Chapter VIII: An End and a Beginning (1)

1852-1857

Lowell had the good fortune to have for a companion at sea Thackeray, who was on his way to America to give his lectures on the English Humourists; he liked the man very much, and his occasional references to the author in his letters and critical papers intimate the high regard he had for his work. Another congenial companion on shipboard was Arthur Hugh Clough, with whom he formed a warm and enduring friendship. It was a thirteen days’ passage, and on the 12th of November the Lowells were again at home in Elmwood. The coming of the two Englishmen gave occasion for many little festivities in Boston and Cambridge. A glimpse is given of them in Mr. Longfellow’s printed journal, when the poet summoned Clough, Lowell, Felton, and C. E. Norton to feast on some English grouse and pheasant sent him from Liverpool by Mr. Henry Bright, and in the evening at the Nortons’ there were private theatricals with a “nice little epilogue written by Mr. Clough,” who shortly established himself indefinitely in Cambridge.

Clough has left a little picture of the interior of Elmwood: “Yesterday I had a walk with James Lowell to a very pretty spot, Beaver Brook. Then I dined with him, his wife, and his father, a fine old minister who is stone deaf, but talks to you. He began by saying that he was born an Englishman, i. e. before the end of the Revolution. Then he went on to say, ‘I have stood as near to George III. as to you now;’ ‘I saw Napoleon crowned Emperor;’ then, ‘Old men are apt to be garrulous, especially about themselves;’ ‘I saw the present Sultan ride through Constantinople on assuming the throne;’ and so on,--all in a strong clear voice, and in perfect sentences, which you saw him making beforehand. And all one could do was to bow and look expressive, for he could only just hear when his son got up and shouted in his ear.”[95] Lowell gave briefly his estimate of Clough’s genius when he wrote a few weeks later to Mr. Briggs: “I wish to write a review of his ‘Bothie,’ to serve him in event of a new edition. It is one of the most charming books ever written,--to my thinking quite as much by itself as the ‘Vicar of Wakefield.’”

With his European experience behind him Lowell was eager to plunge into literature, and his intention at first was to try his hand at fiction, possibly turning his experience to account somewhat after the manner of his neighbor’s “Hyperion.” At any rate, Longfellow notes in his diary under date of 29 November, 1852: “Met Lowell in the street and brought him home to smoke a pipe. He had been to the bookseller’s to buy a blank book to begin a Novel, on the writing of which his mind is bent. He seems rather sad and says he does not take an interest in anything. This is the reaction after the excitement of foreign travel. Lowell will write a capital novel, and when he gets warm in the harness will feel happier;” and a fortnight later he makes the entry: “Lowell came in. He has begun his novel.”

It is to be suspected that he never went far in the attempt. A dozen years later, when Mr. Fields wanted him to write a novel for the _Atlantic Monthly_, he made the summary answer: “I can’t write one nor conceive how any one else can.” Yet he could not have abandoned the trial immediately, for in June he was writing to Briggs: “I have got so far as to have written the first chapter of a prose book,--a sort of New England autobiography, which may turn out well.”[96]

Meanwhile, he was met on his arrival in America with a piece of literary news which was welcome for its own sake and because it promised an outlet for his productions. His friend Briggs as editor-in-chief, with G. W. Curtis and Parke Godwin for assistants, was just about launching a new magazine in New York, which was likely to come nearer fulfilling the ideal Lowell had long cherished than anything thus far issued in America. _Putnam’s Monthly_ had behind it an active publishing house, whose head, Mr. G. P. Putnam, had that indefinable quality which makes a publisher, if not an author himself, a genuine appreciator of good literature, and a man whose friendship with authors rested on a basis which was social as well as commercial. He had shown his sagacity and business insight by taking up the writings of Washington Irving when that author was in neglect, and winning a substantial success with them. He cared for the books he published and listened willingly to Mr. Briggs when that gentleman, who had been engaged in many editorial enterprises, argued that the time was ripe for a literary monthly which should stand for American literature of the best sort, and should at the same time concern itself with public affairs and furnish also that miscellaneous entertainment of narrative and description for which the American public showed a liking. _Harper’s New Monthly Magazine_ had been started a couple of years before, but it was almost wholly a reprint of English current literature, and even its cover was a copy of _Bentley’s_. It had, however, struck a popular taste, and its success made other publishers jealous, while its easy use of foreign matter made the men of letters angry.

The prospectus of _Putnam’s Monthly_, in which the fact that it was to be “an entirely original work” was emphasized, announced that it was “intended to combine the more various and amusing characteristics of a popular magazine with the higher and graver qualities of a quarterly review,” and that when a subject needed illustrations or pictorial examples, such illustrations would occasionally be given. The rate of payment was fair for the time: poetry had no fixed rates, but Lowell received fifty dollars for a poem of two hundred and fifty lines or so, and prose was paid at the rate of three dollars a page. Hawthorne and Emerson were among those who promised their work, though neither seems to have contributed, but Longfellow printed several poems. The articles and poems were all unsigned. The early numbers gave good promise, and Curtis, with his “Prue and I” papers gave a distinction of lightness and added the flavor which every literary magazine covets but can rarely command. The first number, Briggs declared with elation, had run up to twenty thousand copies, and the second number had one of those articles, “Have we a Bourbon among us?” which are the joy of the magazine editor for the buzz which they create in the reading community. But the high hopes with which _Putnam’s_ started out somehow faded. There were exceptionally good poems and the general average of writing was high, but the magazine soon satisfied curiosity without creating a demand, and the financial embarrassment of the publisher after two years compelled a transfer of the publishing interest which was followed by a steady decline in quality.

Meanwhile, Mr. Briggs looked eagerly to Lowell for help, and for his first number received the poem “The Fountain of Youth,” which had been lying in the poet’s portfolio for three years. He suggested that Lowell should publish “The Nooning” as a serial. This was not to be, but whether from this suggestion or not, Lowell suddenly took it into his head to start a serio-comic poem in Alexandrines, under the heading “Our Own, his Wanderings and Personal Adventures,” in which he intended to personate a correspondent of the magazine, who should travel in Europe, and employ his nonsense and satire on men and things. He began leisurely enough, heading his page with a Greek, a Latin, and an English motto, each cleverly hinting at the plan and the name of the piece. The Latin “_Quæ regio in terris Nostri non plena laboris?_” was Englished in

“Full many cities he hath seen and many great men known;
What place on earth but testifies the labors of _our own_?”

Then he makes a doggerel verse under Digression A which slyly imitates Spenser’s verse table-of-contents, and so with Digressions, Invocation, and Progression he saunters carelessly along. “The last few days,” he writes to Briggs, 17 February, 1853, “I have worked in earnest. I wrote one hundred and fifty lines yesterday, and it is thought funny by the constituency in my little Buncombe here. I have hopes that it will be the best thing I have done in the satiric way after I once get fairly agoing. I am thus far taking the run back for the jump. I have enlarged my plan and, if you like it, can make it run through several numbers. It is cruel, impudent,--sassy, I meant to write. Some parts of it I have flavored slightly with Yankee,--but not in dialect. I wish to make it something more than ephemeral, and shall put more thinking into it as I go along. My idea for it is a glass of punch, sweetness, sourness, spirit, and a dash of that Chinese herb favorable to meditation.”

There were three numbers only published of “Our Own,” though the last carried the legend “To be continued” at its foot. The perplexed editor hardly knew how to answer Lowell’s demand for criticism. He himself was immensely entertained, he averred, but nobody else was; although he had heard of one or two, and Lowell added the names of two or three more, it was clear to Mr. Briggs that the verses did not take, and he grew petulant over the stupidity of the public. Lowell’s own ardor cooled. The style of composition was indeed to real writing what the pun is to real wit. In the heat of firing off these fire-crackers, ever so much execution seems to be done, but the laugh that follows is not repeated, and the cleverness and point seem dulled when the bristling jests crowd each other, giving no relief to each.

Lowell could not quite agree with Briggs in the deference which the latter was disposed to pay to the expressions of the public upon the contents of his magazine: “I doubt if your magazine,” he writes, “will become really popular if you edit it for the mob. Nothing is more certain than that popularity goes downward and not up (I mean permanent popularity), and it is what the few like now that the many have got to like by and by. Now don’t turn the tables on me and say that,--not the _very_ few. I have pretty much given up the notion that I can be popular either upward or downward, and what I say has no reference to myself. I wish I could be. But it strikes me that you want as much variety as possible. It is not merely necessary that the matter should be good, but that it should be individual.”

A good many years afterward when Lowell was making up a volume of poems, he looked again at “Our Own” to see if it was worth preserving, and out of the whole six hundred lines he saved only the verses now headed “Fragments of an Unfinished Poem” and the two charming stanzas “Aladdin.”[97] The insertion of this little poem in the midst of his nonsense indicates that if Lowell had found sufficient encouragement he might, especially after reaching Europe in his plan, have worked off the surplusage of high spirits and thrown into his rambling discourse both caustic satire and genial humor.

A more satisfactory and successful contribution which was enthusiastically received by the editor was “A Moosehead Journal,” which was in effect a journal, sent home to his wife, of an excursion made by Lowell in the summer of 1853 with his nephew Charles; and in the spring of 1854 appeared in two parts the well-known sketch of “Cambridge Thirty Years Ago,” under the title, “Fireside Travels.” The paper seems to have grown out of an unused sketch of Allston which Lowell had begun for _Putnam’s_ in September, 1853. “What I have written (or part of it),” he says to the editor, “would make a unique article for your magazine, if the other thing is given up. It is a sketch of Cambridge as it was twenty-five years ago, and is done as nobody but I could do it, for nobody knows the old town so well. I mean one of these days to draw a Commencement as it used to be.” Lowell does not appear to have contributed to _Putnam’s_ after December, 1854, when his portrait, an engraving by Hall after Page’s painting, served as frontispiece to the number, being one of a series of portraits of contributors to the magazine.

Meanwhile, when _Putnam’s_ was at the top of its brief tide, another attempt at a good literary magazine was made in Boston. The extraordinary success of “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” had emboldened its publisher, Mr. John P. Jewett, to undertake what its projector, Mr. F. H. Underwood, called a “Literary and Anti-Slavery Magazine.” It was the intention to issue the first number in January, 1854, and to use the great reputation of Mrs. Stowe to float it by printing a new novel by her. Mr. Underwood[98] was particularly desirous of securing Lowell’s aid, especially as he esteemed his poetry quite the best to be had in America, and he was elated at receiving from him the poem “The Oriole’s Nest,” afterward called simply “The Nest.” But the design which had been germinating for two or three years was suddenly brought to naught by the failure of the luckless publishers, whose success with “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” seems to have been thrust upon them, rather than to have been due to their business ability. So a fortnight after sending his poem, Lowell was forced to write the disconcerted editor: “I cannot help writing a word to say how truly sorry I was to hear of the blowing up of your magazine. But it is not so irreparable as if it had been a powder-magazine, though perhaps all the harder to be borne because it was only _in posse_ and not _in esse_. The explosion of one of those Castles in Spain sometimes sprinkles dust on all the rest of our lives, but I hope you are of better heart, and will rather look upon the affair as a burning of your ships which makes victory the more imperative. Although I could prove by a syllogism in _barbara_ that you are no worse off than you were before, I know very well that you _are_, for if it be bad to lose mere coin, it is still worse to lose hope, which is the mint in which most gold is manufactured.

“But, after all, is it a hopeless case? Consider yourself to be in the position of all the world before the Mansion of our Uncle Thomas (as I suppose we must call it now, it has grown so respectable) was published, and never to have heard of this Mr. Jew-wit. I think he ought to be--that something ought to be done for him: but for that matter nearly all booksellers stand in the same condemnation. There are as good fish in that buccaneering sea of Bibliopoly as ever were caught, and if one of them has broken away from your harpoon, I hope the next may prove a downright kraaken, on whom, if needful, you can pitch your tent and live.

“Don’t think that I am trifling with you. God knows any jests of mine would be of a bitter sort just now; but I know that it is a good thing for a man to be made to look at his misfortune till it assumes its true relations to things about it. So don’t think me intrusive if I nudge your elbow among the rest.”

* * * * *

A few weeks after the return of the Lowells to America, Longfellow took Clough on a walk to Elmwood. “Lowell,” he says, “we found musing before his fire in his study. His wife came in, slender and pale as a lily.” In reading “A Year’s Life” one is struck by the frequency with which the shadow of death falls across the page. It is true that when he wrote the poems, when indeed he fell in with Maria White, Lowell was struggling out of an atmosphere which was full of damp mist, and the image of death naturally rose constantly before him. Yet it remains that from the beginning of his passion he associated this love with the idea of death. So frail, so almost ethereal was the woman who came thus into his life, that from the first he was constantly sheltering her from the cold blast. The solicitude deepened his passion; it accustomed him at the same time to the idea of transitoriness in the life he led. It is entirely possible, nay, very probable, that this spiritually-bodied girl was permitted to develop into a gracious womanhood through the very fact of her marriage and her motherhood: Lowell’s own mood during the nine years of married life was, as we have seen, often irrepressibly gay and sanguine, and after the death of each of their children the two seemed to spring back into a wholesome delight in life. Still, the fear could never have long been out of their minds, and, after Walter died in Rome, the mother seems steadily to have drooped. When Lowell sent “The Nest” to Underwood, he speaks of it as an old poem: “Perhaps,” he says, “it seems better to me than it deserves, for an intense meaning has been added to it.” The meaning had then indeed been deepened, but when it was written, there was more than remote prophecy in the lines--

“When springs of life that gleamed and gushed
Run chilled, and slower, and are hushed.”

The year that passed after the return from Europe saw Mrs. Lowell declining in strength, though it was not till September, 1853, that his letters betray Lowell’s deepening anxiety, and it was not till the end of the month that he fully realized the progress disease had made. Mrs. Lowell died 27 October, and Lowell was left alone with his little daughter. The visionary faculty, which all his life had been what might almost be called another sense, came now to his help and for awhile he lived as if the companion of thirteen years, though shut out from his daily sight, visited him in the solitude and silence of the night. “I have the most beautiful dreams,” he writes, “and never as if any change had come to us. Once I saw her sitting with Walter on her knee, and she said to me, ‘See what a fine strong boy he is grown.’ And one night as I was lying awake and straining my eyes through the gloom, and the palpable darkness was surging and gathering and dispersing as it will, I suddenly saw far, far off a crescent of angels standing and shining silently. But oh! it is a million times better to have had her and lost her, than to have had and kept any other woman I ever saw.”

It had given both husband and wife a great pleasure to see one and another of Mrs. Lowell’s poems printed during the last year in _Putnam’s Monthly_. Mr. Briggs, with his affectionate regard for both, was eager to print the verses as they were sent him, and reported all the agreeable words that came to him respecting the poems. The latest to be printed was one on Avignon, in which the poet kept turning back from the historic and spectacular sights to some oleanders which stood by her window. “How beautiful it was,” Lowell wrote to Briggs, “and how fitting for the last. I am going to print them all--but not publish them yet--she did not wish it. I shall give a copy, with a calotype from a drawing which Cheney is to make from Page’s picture, to all her friends.”

It was a year and more before the volume was printed, bearing the title “The Poems of Maria Lowell,” and inscribed to Mrs. Story, Mrs. Putnam, and Mrs. Shaw, three friends of whose loving appreciation Lowell had had many assurances. There are only twenty poems in the volume. Most had been printed before, one, “The Morning-Glory,” in Lowell’s own collection. None of her translations were included. One looks naturally in such a volume rather for intimations of the writer’s character, and for touches of personal feeling, than for poetic art. Mrs. Lowell herself plainly had but a humble conceit of her poetic gift, and it does not appear that poetry was an abundant resource with her. But art there is of no mean order in this little book. It is a delicate instrument on which she plays; there are not many stops, but there is a vibrant tone which thrills the ear. Tenderness indeed is the prevailing note, but in one poem, “Africa,” there is a massiveness of structure, and a sonorous dignity of measure which appeal powerfully to the imagination. The poems have, here and there, an autobiographic value. One written in Rome, shortly after the travellers had reached that city and the dream of childhood had come true, ended with the verses:--

“And Rome lay all before us in its glory,
Its glory and its beautiful decay,
But, like the student in the oft-read story,
I could have turned away,

“To the still chamber with its half-closed shutter
Where the beloved father lay in pain,
To sit beside him in contentment utter,
Never to part again.”

There are four sonnets in which her love for her husband glows with a deep, steady passion, one of them written doubtless in the solemn days near the end, in the spirit recorded by Lowell when he wrote to Briggs after her death: “She promised to be with me if that were possible.”

“In the deep flushing of the Western sky
The new moon stands as she would fain be gone,
And, dropping earthward, greet Endymion:
If Death uplift me, even thus should I,
Companioned by the silver spirits high,
And stationed on the sunset’s crimson towers,
Bend longing over earth’s broad stretch of bowers,
To where my love beneath their shades might lie:
For I should weary of the endless blue,
Should weary of my ever-growing light,
If that one soul, so beautiful and true,
Were hidden by earth’s vapors from my sight,
Should wane and wane as changeful planets do,
And move on slowly, wrapt in mine own night.”

What most impresses the reader who takes all these poems at a sitting is the reserve, the just balance of sentiment which controls them. Passion is here, but it is not stormy, and love and tenderness, but they are not feeble and tearful. Depth of feeling and strength of character lie open to view in the firm lines, and the fine light and shade of the verse come incontrovertibly from a nature evenly poised, whose companionship must have been to Lowell that of a kindred spirit, capable indeed of guiding and not merely of seconding his resolves.

The frontispiece to the volume, which is here reproduced, was a crystallotype of a drawing by Cheney after Page’s portrait. “It is like,” Lowell wrote at the time, “as far as there can be any likeness made of a face so full of spiritual beauty, and in which so much of the charm was subterficial.” He tried to convey to a friend, with whom his association was purely literary, some notion of her when he wrote: “All that was written of Lady Digby, all that Taylor said of the Countess of Carbery and Donne of Elizabeth Drury--belongs as well to her, she was so beautiful and good. She was born 8th July, 1821, married 26th December, 1844, and went home 27th October, 1853. ‘The Pilgrim they laid in a large upper chamber whose windows opened toward the sunrising: and the name of the chamber was Peace.’”

This was written more than a year after the event. He made use of the same allusion just after his wife’s death, when writing to his friend Briggs, but added mournfully that he himself was not in that chamber. Indeed, in the first months of his desolation he was in a most unhappy state, and endured a loneliness from which now and then an uncontrollably passionate cry would be uttered. His father was perfectly deaf and often alarmingly excitable, and his sister Rebecca eccentric to a degree which made her preserve for days an absolute silence. He would rush out into the world, and there showed an artificial gayety which bewildered his friends, only to come back to despise himself. “I know perfectly well,” he wrote to his most intimate friend, “that my nature is naturally joyous and susceptible of all happy impressions; but that is the very reason I am wretched. I am afraid of myself. I dread the world and its temptations, for I do long to keep myself pure enough to satisfy her who was better than all I can say of her. I often troubled her while she was here, but I cannot bear to now that she is in entire felicity.” He was, as he afterward said of himself, in great agony of mind, and he had to force himself into those laborious hours which one instinctively feels contain a wise restorative.

He was, in a measure, undergoing solitary confinement. He sat in his lonely study, or walked up and down, pencilling sentences on the wall as if he were really a prisoner, and finding a strange consolation in repeating the Service for the Dead, which he had learned by heart. “I remember,” he wrote long after,[99] “the ugly fancy I had sometimes that I was another person, and used to hesitate at the door when I came back from my late night walks, lest I should find the real owner of the room sitting in my chair before the fire. A well-nigh hermit life I had led till then.” There were but few who could approach his real self in those days, but there came from Longfellow a gentle word of consolation in his poem “The Two Angels,” written on the coincidence of the birth of his own daughter and the death of Mrs. Lowell.

Meanwhile, his letters, even when disclosing his misery, contained happy references to his sturdy, affectionate child. True, all the losses he had suffered seemed now to be but the messengers of a final disaster. “I have only one lamb left of four,” he wrote to an occasional correspondent, “and think I hear the foot of the inexorable wolf if a leaf rustle;” but as the days went by this sensitiveness subsided. He was fortunate in having for her a most admirable governess, and he found the child’s companionship an unfailing joy. “I said as I sat down to dinner,” he writes in one of his letters; “‘This is a rare day, I have positively had an idea.’ Not knowing the meaning of ‘idea,’ and I being in the habit of telling her (when she is _hypt_, no rare thing) that she has some disease to which I give a very hard name,--she thought I was joking, and said, ‘Nonsense, papa, you haven’t got an idea,’--evidently thinking it some terrible complaint. ‘Why, shouldn’t you like a papa that had ideas?’ She threw her arms round my neck and said: ‘You dear papa! you’re just the kind of papa that I love!’” “Mabel,” he writes again, “has just begun to have ‘Robinson Crusoe’ read to her. Think of that and burst with envy! What have you and I left in life like that? She has already arranged a coronet of feathers, and proposes to play Indian Chief in future. Her great part lately has been the Great Wild Goat of the Parlor,--produced every evening with unbounded applause, especially from the chief actor. With a pair of newspaper horns she chases her father (who knows what it is to be tossed on the horns of the newspapers), qualifying his too excessive terrors with a kiss at last to show that it is really not _real_, but only play.... She has been in the habit of hearing her grandfather always say, ‘If Providence permit,’ of course not knowing what it meant. But one day, having made an uncommonly successful slide, she turned triumphantly to her aunt and cried, ‘There, _that_ time I went like Providence permit.’ The doctor ordered her a blanket bath. She had already tried one and said, ‘If you please, papa, I had rather not.’ ‘But, darling, most people like them very much.’ ‘Well, papa, _I_ don’t; people have different tastes you know. I’ve often noticed that everybody has a different mind.’”

Added to the need of wresting his mind from the despondency of grief was the pecuniary pressure. He had an income at this time from such little property as he possessed of six hundred dollars a year, and that plainly would not suffice. So he shook his portfolio, and even began writing new poems which he sent to his friend Briggs for _Putnam’s_, and he set about working over the letters he had written in Italy, publishing them in _Graham’s Magazine_, under the title “Leaves from my Italian Journal.” It was easier to do such mechanical work as this, and he began to speculate on the possibility of editing Shakespeare, and meditated a life of Dean Swift. He did during 1854 edit Marvell for the series of _British Poets_ which his friend Professor Child was preparing for Little, Brown & Co., expending a good deal of loving care on the text, and editing Henry Rogers’s brief memoir by omissions, illustrations from Marvell’s writings, and a slight addition. He wrote also at this time, for use in the same series, the brief sketch of Keats which afterward he placed with his collected essays. As an introduction to Keats’s poems, it was designedly more biographical than critical, and did little more than set forth in a lively fashion the facts gathered by Milnes. When one considers Lowell’s early appreciation of Keats, it seems a little singular that he should have contented himself with so slight an expression.

Lowell spent the last week of June, 1854, at Newport, R. I., on a visit to the Nortons, and then went for the summer to Beverly, chiefly to be near his sister, Mrs. Charles Lowell. At this time the north shore of Massachusetts Bay had all the charm of rock and beach which it now has, with a pristine simplicity of life which it has lost. To-day the visitor drives through the woods near Beverly by well-kept roads, meeting at every turn other carriages and pleasure parties. Then, the woods were as beautiful, but had unbroken solitude. “At Newport,” Lowell wrote to Miss Norton, “you have no woods, and ours are so grand and deep and unconverted! They have those long pauses of conscious silence that are so fine, as if the spirit that inhabits them were hiding from you and holding its breath,--and then all the leaves stir again, and the pines cheat the rocks with their mock surf, and that invisible bird that haunts such solitudes calls once and is answered, and then silence again.”

A letter to Mr. Norton, dated 14 August, 1854, hints at the restful character of this seaside sojourn. “This is an outlying dependency of the Castle of Indolence, and even more lazy,--in proportion as the circulation is more languid at the extremities. By dint of counting on my fingers, and with the aid of an old newspaper and an almanac, I have approximated, I believe, to the true date of your world out there, and that seems to me quite a sufficient mental achievement for one morning. The chief food of the people here is Lotus. It is cunning to take various shapes,--sometimes fish, sometimes flesh, fowl, eggs, or what not,--but is always Lotus. It does not make us forget, only Memory is no longer recollection, it is passive, not active, and mixes real with feigned things, just as in perfectly still pools the images of clouds filter down through the transparent water and make one perspective with the matter-of-fact weeds at the bottom. I feel as if I had sunk in a diving-bell provisioned and aired for three months, and knew not of storm or calm, or of the great keels, loaded, perhaps, with fate, that sigh hoarsely overhead toward their appointed haven....

“What do I do? Tarry at Jericho chiefly. Also I row and fish, and have learned to understand the life of a shore fisherman thoroughly. Sometimes I get my dinner with my lines,--a rare fate for a poet. Sometimes I watch the _net_ result when the tritons draw their seine. Also I grow brown, and have twice lost and renewed the skin of my hands and, alas, my nose, Also I know what hunger is and, reversing the Wordsworthian sheep, am one feeding like forty.”

He went on one or two short cruises and enjoyed the genuine country life with its salt flavor, but was back at Elmwood in the fall. The year had found some intimate expression in his verse, as well as the more objective poems like “Pictures from Appledore,” suggested in part it may be by one of his summer cruises, though the last section was written four years before. Mr. Stillman, who made his acquaintance at this time, when he was foraging for _The Crayon_, the new literary and art journal which his enthusiasm had projected, speaks warmly of the princely courtesy with which Lowell received him. “Out of the depth of the shadow over his life,” he writes,[100] “in the solitude of his study, with nothing but associations of his wrecked happiness permitted around him, the kindly sympathy with a new aspiration wakened him to a momentary gaiety, his humor flashed out irrepressible, and his large heart turned its warmest side to the new friend, who came only to make new calls on his benevolence; that is, to give him another opportunity to bestow himself on others.” On his part, Lowell welcomed heartily this ingenuous lover of art and letters. They took long walks together over the country Lowell knew so well, to Beaver Brook, the Waverley Oaks, and the Waltham hills. “You made me fifteen years younger,” he wrote, “while you stayed. When a man gets to my age, enthusiasms don’t often knock at the door of his garret. I am all the more charmed with them when they come. A youth full of such pure intensity of hope and faith and purpose, what is he but the breath of a resurrection-trumpet to stiffened old fellows, bidding us up out of our clay and earth if we would not be too late?”

The poems which register the tranquillity of a return to common life, like “The Windharp” and “Auf Wiedersehen,” are tremulous with the emotion which he could bear to express. Indeed, when Lowell came to print the former of these poems he omitted one stanza, possibly as going farther than he cared to with his contemporaneous public. In the letter last quoted, he sent it to Mr. Stillman.

“O tress that so oft on my heart hath lain,
Rocked to rest within rest by its thankful beating,
Say, which is harder,--to bear the pain
Of laughter and light, or to wait in vain,
’Neath the unleaved tree, the impossible meeting?
If Death’s lips be icy, Life gives, iwis,
Some kisses more clay-cold and darkening than his!”

But as a comprehensive record of this whole experience, the “Ode to Happiness” written at this time may be taken as most conclusive. The very form of the ode, a form to which Lowell was wont to resort in the great passages of his life, aided the expression, for its gravity, its classic reserve, even its labored lines served best to hold that sustained mood which impelled the poet to stand as it were before an altar and make his sacrificial hymn. Tranquillity, he avers, is the elder sister of Happiness. “She is not that,” he says:--

“She is not that for which youth hoped,
But she hath blessings all her own,
Thoughts pure as lilies newly oped,
And faith to sorrow given alone:

* * * * *

‘I am she
Whom the gods love, Tranquillity:
That other whom you seek forlorn
Half earthly was: but I am born
Of the immortals, and our race
Wears still some sadness on its face:
He wins me late, but keeps me long,
Who, dowered with every gift of passion,
In that fierce flame can forge and fashion
Of sin and self the anchor strong;
Can thence compel the driving force
Of daily life’s mechanic course,
Nor less the nobler energies
Of needful toil and culture wise;
Whose soul is worth the tempter’s lure,
Who can renounce, and yet endure,
To him I come, not lightly wooed,
But won by silent fortitude.’”[101]

From this time forward, however he might be subject to transient moods, as one with so much sensibility would inevitably be, Lowell was yet free from the violent and tempestuous fluctuations of mood which heretofore had marked his course. The first desolation over, that influence which during Mrs. Lowell’s lifetime had always been accompanied by the dark shadow of a threatened loss, now became, paradoxical as the phrase may be, permanent and profound. No human accident could affect it, and as Lowell’s own powers had passed through the experimental stage, there came a steadiness of aim and a maturity of expression which thenceforth were registered in successive sure and firm-footed performances. It may truly be said that Lowell had now found himself, and that from this period dates the full orbit of a course which had heretofore been more or less eccentric, but now could be reasonably calculated. Surprises there were to be, but surprises of excellent achievement, rather than of new ventures.

It is therefore with special interest that one notes the character of the work which occupied Lowell in this eventful season of 1854-1855. Some time before he had been asked by his kinsman who directed the Lowell Institute to give a course of lectures before it, and had been paid in advance; he had made some movement toward preparation, but now he set about it in earnest, and began the delivery 9 January, 1855. There were to be twelve lectures, and he was to discourse on poetry in general and English poetry in particular. Something of the exhilaration with which he entered upon the engagement may be seen in a note written to Mr. Norton three days before the first lecture, and inclosing a ticket to the course.

“This will admit you to one of the _posti distinti_ to witness the
celebrated _tableau vivant_ of the sacrifice of Iphigenia
(Iphigenia, by particular request, Mr. J. R. Lowell). It is well
known that this interesting ceremony was originally performed for
the sake of raising the wind, and Mr. L. will communicate a spirit
of classic reality to the performance by going through it with the
same end in view.

“I write this by the hand of an amanuensis whom I have had in my
employment for some time, and who has learned how to catch my ideas
without my being obliged to speak--a great gain.

“(A great gain indeed! the greatest bore in the world! He thinks I
am writing what he dictates at this moment because he hears the pen
scratch. He pretends to be a good-natured fellow--but if you only
knew him as I do! He has no more feeling than a horseradish.)

“I should have come last Saturday to Shady Hill--but you may guess
how busy I have been. (It is _I_ who have had all the work, and
only my board and tobacco for wages: _he_ pretend to hate slavery!)

“I have only just got the flood on, and feel as if I might deliver
a course that will not disgrace me.

“(I almost hope they will, for what right has he to keep me shut up
here? I get no walks, and he begins to keep me awake at nights with
his cursed ideas as he calls them. What _is_ an idea, I should like
to know?)

“I have only one _private_ entrance ticket to spare--but I suppose
you do not want any more.

Give my best regards and happy New Years and all kinds of things at
Shady Hill (and mine, too; how mad he’d be if he knew I put that
in).

“Always yours,
“The Amanuensis of J. R. Lowell, esquire.”

Two days after giving the first lecture, Lowell wrote to Stillman:--

“I have been so fearfully busy with my lectures! and so nervous
about them, too! I had never spoken in public, there was a great
rush for tickets (the lectures are gratis), only one in five of the
applicants being supplied--and altogether I was taken quite aback.
I had no idea there would be such a desire to hear me. I delivered
my first lecture to a crowded hall on Tuesday night, and I believe
I have succeeded. The lecture was somewhat abstract, but I kept the
audience perfectly still for an hour and a quarter. (They are in
the habit of going out at the end of the hour.) I delivered it
again yesterday afternoon to another crowd,[102] and was equally
successful--so I think I am safe now. But I have six yet to write,
and am consequently very busy and pressed for time. I felt anxious,
of course, for I had a double responsibility. The lectures were
founded by a cousin of mine, and the trustee is another cousin--so
I wished not only to do credit to myself and my name, but to
justify my relative in appointing me to lecture. It is all over
now--and, as far as the public are concerned, I have succeeded; but
the lectures keep me awake and make me lean.”

Mr. Longfellow was a very interested auditor, and his diary bears witness to the attention which he gave to the course:--

“January 8, 1855. Lowell came in the evening and we talked about his lectures on poetry which begin to-morrow.

“January 9. Mr. Richard Grant White, of New York, author of ‘Shakespeare’s Scholar,’ came to tea. He drove in with us to hear Lowell’s first lecture: an admirable performance, and a crowded audience. After it, we drove out to Norton’s, where, with T. and the lecturer, we had a pleasant supper.

“January 20. Lowell’s lecture, on the old English ballads, one of the best of the course.”

Charles Sumner appears also to have been one of the auditors. At any rate, he wrote to Longfellow from Washington, 6 February, 1855: “Lowell’s lecture on Milton lifted me for a whole day. It was the utterance of genius in honor of genius.”

Mr. Fields asked Lowell for the lectures for publication, but he put him off “till they were better,” and never published them. They were reported at the time by Lowell’s old friend, Robert Carter, in the _Boston Daily Advertiser_, and some time after Lowell’s death these reports were gathered into a volume and printed privately for the Rowfant Club of Cleveland, Ohio.

The form in which the lectures were reported, sometimes direct, sometimes indirect, undoubtedly robs them of some of the charm which the hearers acknowledged, but enough remains to give one a tolerably clear impression of Lowell’s mode of treatment. The first lecture was occupied with definitions, and in a familiar way Lowell set about distinguishing poetry from prose, and by a variety of illustrations gave some notion of the great operations of the imagination. Having cleared the way, he took up the consideration of English poetry in the historical order, dealing with the forerunners, Piers Ploughman’s Vision, the Metrical Romances, and the Ballads; and then devoting one lecture each to Chaucer, Spenser, Milton, Butler, and Pope. The discussion of Pope led him to interrupt himself, and in the next lecture take up the subject of Poetic Diction, for after expressing his admiration of the consummate art of Pope’s artificiality, he wished to inquire whether there might not be a real, vital distinction between the language of prose raised to a high degree of metrical efficiency and the language of poetry. His readers will recall the amusing passage in an article on “Swinburne’s Tragedies,” in which, when wishing to illustrate the Greek battledoor and shuttlecock style of dialogue, he finds it easier to make a burlesque imitation than to hunt up some passage in Sophocles. In like manner he invents a piece of descriptive verse--a Lapland sketch--as an instance of the artificial manner brought in by Pope, but lacking his wonderful manipulation of language. It is a felicitous example of Lowell’s imitative faculty, which led him, when he began to write, to throw off lines in Burns’s manner, but which never betrayed him when he was in earnest in poetry. The imitation was in itself a criticism. He liked to emphasize the essential element of poetry by instancing the empty form. Mr. Dante Rossetti once overpowered me by producing a thin volume of verse by T. H. Chivers, M. D., and reading aloud from it and demanding information about the author. When I applied to Lowell afterward, he said that Dr. Chivers had been wont to send him his books, and he read them aloud to his classes as illustrations of the shell of Shelley. A lecture followed on Wordsworth, and then the twelfth was devoted to the Function of the Poet, which in its brief report intimates that Lowell was thinking less of himself than of the country with its need of a seer.

The delivery of the lectures had one immediate and important result. Mr. Longfellow had been Smith Professor of the French and Spanish Languages and Literatures and Professor of Belles Lettres in Harvard College since 1836, having come to the work when Lowell was midway through his course, but he made up his mind in 1854 that he must give up the post, not from ill-health, but because he wished to try the effect of change on his mind, and of freedom from routine. “Household occupations,” he wrote to Freiligrath, “children, relatives, friends, strangers, and college lectures, so completely fill up my days that I have no time for poetry, and, consequently, the last two years have been very unproductive with me.” Freiligrath had heard rumors of Longfellow’s resignation, and had put in an application to be his successor. Longfellow could not give him any encouragement, since, though foreigners were employed to teach the several languages, the professor himself must be an American. There were, he said, six candidates for the position, all friends of his. Lowell was not one of these, but his lectures had marked him as the fit successor, and so Longfellow wrote with satisfaction in his diary, 31 January, 1855: “Lowell is to be my successor! Dr. Walker talked with me about it this morning, and I have been to see Lowell about the preliminaries, and the matter is as good as settled. I am sorry for some of my friends who want the place. But for lectures, I think Lowell the best of the candidates. He has won his spurs and will give the college just what it needs.” Lowell himself told the news to his friend Briggs in the following letter, dated 9 February, 1855:--

“I have been silent ever so long because I could not help it. I have been lecturing four times a week (and am now), and, with my usual discretion, put off writing my lectures till the last moment, so that for five weeks I have been with the bayonet pricking me on close behind, and have hardly dared to _think_ even of anything else. But I have not forgotten you, my dear old friend, nor my love of you, and I have felt a kind of pang now and then because I said in my last note that I would soon write to you--as, indeed, I am always intending to do.

“I write now because I have something pleasant to tell, and did not wish you to hear it first from any one but me--though you always seem to live at one end of an ear of Dionysius that brings you all the news of itself. The news is this: The Corporation of the college have asked me to take Longfellow’s place, and my nomination will go to the Overseers next Thursday.

“The thing has come about in the pleasantest way, and the place has sought me, not I, it. There were seven applicants for the place, but I was not one of them. On the contrary, I had refused to be a candidate when it was proposed to me.

“I have accepted the offer, and am to go abroad for a year to prepare myself. _That_ is the hardest part, but I did not feel competent without it.

“And the duties are pleasant. I am not to have anything to do with teaching, as Longfellow had, but only to deliver two courses of lectures in the year--on pretty much any subject I choose, and my salary is to be $1200.00.

“Everybody seems pleased. My first thought was a sad one, for the heart that would have beat warmest is still. Then I thought of my father, and then of you. I think it will be all the better for Mabel that I should have enough to live on, without being forced to write, and I shall have time enough after the first year to do pretty much what I like....

“My lectures have succeeded quite beyond my expectation. One or two have been pretty good, but I have felt sad in writing them, and somehow feel as if I had not got _myself_ into them very much. However, folks are pleased.”

Very likely the fame of his lectures brought him invitations to go elsewhere; at any rate, when his course in Boston was finished, he made a tour in the West, and became so desperately out of conceit with the business before a week had passed that he tried to escape the remaining lectures, but he was not released and had at least the satisfaction of carrying home six hundred dollars as the proceeds. “I hate this business of lecturing,” he wrote from Madison, Wisconsin, to Miss Norton. “To be received at a bad inn by a solemn committee, in a room with a stove that smokes but not exhilarates, to have three cold fish-tails laid in your hand to shake, to be carried to a cold lecture-room, to read a cold lecture to a cold audience, to be carried back to your smoke-side, paid, and the three fish-tails again--well, it is not delightful exactly.”

Lowell does not seem to have written anything in the short time that elapsed after the close of his lecture tour before he sailed for Europe, though he showed a lively interest in Mr. Stillman’s paper _The Crayon_, and sent it his poem “Invita Minerva,” in which Longfellow discovered a reminder of Emerson’s “Forerunners.” The fact that Lowell was to be the elder poet’s successor naturally drew them together much at this time. “A beautiful morning,” wrote Longfellow on the 17th of May. “Went and sat an hour with Lowell in his upper chamber among the treetops. He sails for Havre the first of June; “and on the 29th he records: “Lowell’s friends gave him a farewell dinner at the Revere, whereat I had the honor of presiding. A joyous banquet: one of the pleasantest I ever attended,--a meeting of friends to take leave of a friend whom we all love.” Lowell himself refers briefly to the occasion in a note written the next day: “Everything went off finely after you left. Holmes sang another song and repeated some very charming verses,[103] and Rölker to his own intense delight got through two stanzas of ‘a helf to ve nortward boun’,’ William White having incautiously supplied him with the initial line. He gave it with so much sentiment that we were all entirely overcome and laughed so immoderately that the brave Rölker at length sat down. We sang ‘Auld lang syne’ in true college style and so parted. On the whole I renewed my youth last night--and my recollections of ‘1790’ this morning, for I only had four hours’ sleep. However, aboard ship I shall have leisure enough to emulate Chaucer’s Morpheus

‘That slept and did no other work.’”

That day Longfellow drove into town with Lowell and saw him off for New York, whence he was to sail.

But the weeks before Lowell’s departure brought other things to mind than leaving home and affectionate friends. He had been asked to pronounce a poem before the senior class of Hamilton College at the coming commencement. The invitation reached him on the memorable day when the runaway slave Burns was captured in the streets of Boston, and he wrote in reply to the invitation: “In six months I shall be in Switzerland; an ocean between me and a slave hunt, thank God!”

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