Chapter III: First Ventures (1)

1838-1844

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“How much lies in that one word ‘Past’!
More than in all that waits before;
How many a saddened glance is cast
To that stern wall of nevermore,
Whose shadow glooms our heart’s deep core.

* * * * *

“As hard it is for mortal glance
To pierce the Has been’s mystery
And force of iron circumstance
Which said let these and these things be,
As to resolve futurity.

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

“And many shades of joy and woe
Pass cloudlike, silent, o’er my soul,
Which not one being else may know,
And into utter darkness roll,
Links lost from out my being’s whole.

* * * * *

“This Present is becoming Past;
Live then each moment manfully
If you would wish your deeds to last,
Sowing good seed continually
Whose harvest time is yet to be.

* * * * *

“In our great pride we think that we
Build up our high or low estate,
Dimly half conscious that we see
The paths which lead to small and great
Through the fixed eye of settled Fate.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And then like a Spring-swollen river
Roll the full waves of her tumultuous thought,
Crested with glittering spray;
Her wild lips curve and quiver,
And my rapt soul on the deep stream upcaught,
Lulled by a dreamful music ever,
Unwittingly is borne away.

* * * * *

I float to a delicious land,
By a sunset Heaven spanned,
And musical with streams.
Around, the calm majestic forms
And Godlike eyes of early Greece I see,
Or listen till my spirit warms
To songs of courtly chivalry,
Or weep, unmindful if my tears be seen,
For the meek suffering love of poor Undine.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Good by, J. R. L.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Dear, glorious creature!”

he exclaims, near the close of the poem,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

BOSTON, Dec. 5, 1841.