Chapter III: First Ventures (2)

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

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

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

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

I remain your friend,
J. R. LOWELL.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

LELAND & WHITING.

October 15th, 1842.

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

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

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

“‘Whose rafters sprout upon the shady side.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

he had outlined the function of the poet; and the whole set of his nature in the months between his engagement and his marriage was in the direction of poetic earnestness. His conception was dominated by moral enthusiasm: the preacher in him was always thrusting himself to the front, and the reformer of the day sometimes masqueraded in his verse in very antique forms. But his genuine love of art above all his unfailing apprehension of poetry as an end in itself saved him from a merely utilitarian notion of his high calling. And it is safe to say that he never was so happy as when he was abandoning himself to the full enjoyment of poetic composition. He diverted the streams of love and of anti-slavery fervor into this full current, and could say of his “Prometheus” that it was “overrunning with true radicalism and anti-slavery;” but the exhilaration which fanned his wings was the consciousness of youth and love finding an outlet in the natural voice of poetry. “I was never so happy as now,” he writes to Loring, 15 June, after telling of his “Prometheus” and “A Legend of Brittany,” on which he was at work. “I see Maria every other day. I am embowered in leaves, have a voluntary orchestra of birds and bees and frogs, and a little family of chickens to whom I have a sort of feeling of paternity, and begin to believe I had some share in begetting them.”

Page painted Lowell’s portrait when he was in New York and exhibited it in the spring. This picture is at once a likeness of the poet and an expression of the painter. Page was an idealist who found a most congenial subject in Lowell. Out of the dark canvass--for the painter, pursuing the elusive phantom of a recovery of the art of the Venetians, succeeded at any rate in giving to his work an ancient air--there looks forth a face which is the very apparition of poetry. Far removed from the sentimental aspect, it has depth of feeling, a serene assurance, and a Shakespearean ideality. It is not difficult to see that Page was not painting in Lowell a young Cambridge author, but the student of the English dramatists and the inheritor of all the ages of poetry. To his own neighbors and friends Lowell had much of this air in his presence. His flowing chestnut hair falling in rich masses from an equally dividing line, his unshorn face, his eyes with their kindly wistful look, his tremulous mouth,--all served to separate him in appearance from common men and to mark him as an unusual person.

How affectionately Lowell regarded Page and what admiration he had for his genius may be read in the dedication to him which was prefixed to his “Poems” issued in 1843 and retained in later collections. The frankness with which he avows his love for his friend is a witness to that openness of Lowell’s nature which we have already noticed, and the terms in which he speaks of Page’s art and of the artistic faith which they held in common give a hint of the basis of their comradery. Lowell disclaimed any special knowledge of painting, and always brought to bear, in his discussions on art, the principles which he had learned through his devotion to the art of poetry. In the relation of the two men to each other one is half tempted to recall the friendship of Keats and Haydon. In each case the poet believed in the painter less by reason of the work done than because of the ideals

held and aimed at. Page was an enthusiast, and a man of mingled imaginative and speculative powers. As Haydon preached the Elgin marbles to Keats, so Page discoursed on the old masters to Lowell. But the reciprocal admiration of Lowell and Page was really for the man behind the art. “I am glad you like my poems,” Lowell wrote to Mrs. Shaw; “Page is wiser than you and likes them because he knows I am better than they;” and to Mr. Briggs he had written shortly before: “You are a great deal better than anything you write, and Page than anything he paints, and I always think of you without your pen, and of him without his brushes.”

The admiration and affection with which Page and Briggs regarded Lowell were only more intimate than the feelings which were generally aroused. He had come to be looked on as a new poet. So Hawthorne, in his “Hall of Fantasy,” as first published, characterized him as “the poet of the generation that now enters upon the stage.” When the _Pioneer_ was started Lowell’s was a name to conjure with. “The principal editor,” says the _Tribune_, “is well and widely known as one of the most gifted and promising poets in America;” and a Philadelphia paper speaks of the journal as “edited by a man whose genius and originality is at once the praise and wonder of his countrymen.” To be sure, newspaper praise is apt to be pitched in a high key, and the army of independent admirers on closer examination turns out to be a company of the author’s enthusiastic friends marching and countermarching across the stage, disappearing in one wing only to come out from another. But after all allowance has been made, it is clear that in a community which was eagerly expecting great things in literature, Lowell, though he had published little and much of that anonymously, was already one of the candidates for fame. He himself did not need this incentive. He had the consciousness of power and that audience of one which stimulated him to the exercise of his power.

“A Year’s Life” had been frankly autobiographic. The poems written afterward and now collected in the 1843 volume were the distinct outgrowth of a nature stimulated by this new experience of love and at last both fully alive to the consciousness of poetic feeling and eager with a desire to act out the aspirations which had been blown into flame by the breath of love. Hence the volume, in its contents, is of varied character, as the poet himself held within his restless life the somewhat contradictory elements which go to make up a poet and a reformer. “A Legend of Brittany,” which is the substantial piece, and stands at the front, is a piece of pure romance, pretty evidently sprung from the soil in which grew Keats’s “Isabella; or the Pot of Basil.” The underlying theme is not dissimilar, the measure is the same, and there is something of the same richness of color and delight in the beauty of single, even unfamiliar words. Yet the reader feels that Keats not only had the more vivid imagination, but a clearer sense of the beauty that lies in intensity of expression--an intensity so great that one almost holds one’s breath as he reads. Lowell, as we know, rarely essayed anything in the nature of story-telling; the dramatic faculty was not his, and keen as was his appreciation of the power of the elder dramatists, his criticism shows that he dwelt most emphatically on those passages and lines which disclose poetic beauty, rather than the features of construction. But Keats’s warmth and richness of decorative painting appealed to him with peculiar force at a time when he himself had come out into the sunshine and was intoxicated with his own happiness. It is clear that when he was writing “A Legend of Brittany” he was revelling in the possession of poetic fancy, and drawing himself to the height of his enjoyment of pure poetry unmixed with elements of didacticism. He wrote to G. B. Loring, 15 June, 1843, “I am now at work on a still longer poem [than “Prometheus”] in the _ottava rima_ to be the first in my forthcoming volume. I feel more and more assured every day that I shall yet do something that will keep my name (and perhaps my body) alive. My wings were never so light and strong as now. So hurrah for a niche and a laurel.” The poem did not apparently call out any strong response, nor has it, I suspect, ever been read with very great admiration--certainly it cannot for a moment be compared in popularity with “The Vision of Sir Launfal,” which followed five years later, and the explanation is perhaps to be found mainly in its derivative character, even though readers might not be acutely aware how far it owed its origin to Keats.

Mr. Briggs, who was the stanchest of Lowell’s literary friends at this time, wrote with enthusiasm of the volume, using terms of admiration which must have been grateful indeed, since they were charged with discrimination and just appreciation; but he was frank and honest in his friendly judgment, and he wrote to Lowell of “A Legend of Brittany:” “It is too warm, rich, and full of sweet sounds and sights; the incense overpowers me, and the love and crime, and prayers and monks and glimpses of spirits oppress me. I am too much a clod of earth to mingle well in such elements. I feel while reading it as though I were lying upon a bed of down with a canopy of rose-colored silk above me, with gleams of sunshine darting in the room and half revealing and at times more than revealing strange figures painted upon the walls of my chamber. But I do not wonder that M. W. should like it. It is the proper reading for pure-minded loving creatures, from whose eyes knowledge with its hard besom has not yet swept away the golden cobwebs of fancy. I like her the better myself for liking it.”[38]

This long poem is not the only one in the book which springs from pure delight in poetic imagination; but it is by far the most full and unalloyed expression of this pleasure. When one reads, however, such a poem as “Rhœcus,” with its preface apologizing for so much paganism, and its application, and especially when one reads “Prometheus,” one is aware how largely Lowell was dominated, even in this time when his soul was flushed with the sense of beauty and awake to the tendrils it was putting forth, by a strong purpose to read the lesson of beauty and love to his fellows. The seriousness of life was indeed charged with an exalted meaning by the revelation which came to him when he was admitted into the intimate companionship of a woman who had in her something of the spirit of a prophetess, but it would be untrue to say that Maria White handed him the torch; she kindled to a greater brilliancy that which he already held, and his love transmuted the vague stirrings of his own nature into more definite purpose. Keats, to refer again to one with whom Lowell certainly had spiritual kinship, was mildly affected somewhat in the same way by the friendship which he formed in his impressionable years with Hunt and his circle, and if we could imagine Fanny Brawne a Mary Wollstonecraft, we might speculate on the effect she would have had on his poetry. Even Keats, with his passionate devotion to beauty, could dig a subterranean passage under the opening of the third book of “Endymion” for the purpose of blowing up the “present ministers;” and Lowell, taking the world-worn myth of Prometheus, could write into it reflections apposite to what he regarded as a tremendous upheaving force just ready to manifest itself in society. The poem of “Prometheus,” however, justly stands high in the estimation of Lowell’s readers, for the thought involved in it rises above the level of a didactic utterance, and carries with it an impersonation of human dignity which saves it from the reproach of making the myth a mere text for a modern discourse. The poem is the most comprehensive and largest expression of the mind of the poet at this period of emancipation, and the fine images with which it abounds spring from the subject itself and are not mere decorations.

Here, again, a comparison of “Prometheus” with Keats’s “Hyperion” illustrates the infusion of moral ardor which separates the disciple from the master. Keats summed up his poetic philosophy in the lines--

“For ’tis the eternal law
That first in beauty should be first in might,”--

and he was fain to see the operation of Nature’s law by which one race of conquerors would dispossess another.

“So on our heels a fresh perfection treads.”

Lowell, speculating on the eternal struggle, figured in “Prometheus,” of right and wrong, of darkness and light, bids Jove heed that he--

“And all strength shall crumble except love”--

and sees in a vision--

“Peaceful commonwealths where sunburnt Toil
Reaps for itself the rich earth made its own.”

Mr. Briggs, writing to him on the appearance of the poem in the _Democratic Review_, reminds him that he had read a bit of it when visiting him in his house at Staten Island, and adds: “But I did not anticipate that you could or would lengthen out those few lines into a poem so full of majesty and sweetness. So far as my observation will allow me to judge, it is the best sustained effort of the American Muse. The structure of the verse is exceedingly fine to my ear, although it may not be as acceptable to the public ear as the almost emasculate smoothness of Bryant, to which it has been accustomed. The bold bright images with which ‘Prometheus’ abounds would be sufficient of themselves to give you a name among the wielders of the pen, but the noble and true spirit of Philosophy which they help to develop makes them appear of secondary importance, and gives you a claim to a higher renown than the mere word-mongers of Parnassus can ever aspire to.” Lowell, in replying to this letter, wrote: “My ‘Prometheus’ has not received a single public notice yet, though I have been puffed to repletion for poems without a tithe of its merit. Your letter was the first sympathy I received. Although such great names as Goethe, Byron, and Shelley have all handled the subject in modern times, you will find that I have looked at it from a somewhat new point of view. I have made it _radical_, and I believe that no poet in this age can write much that is good unless he give himself up to this tendency. For radicalism has now for the first time taken a distinctive and acknowledged shape of its own. So much of its spirit as poets in former ages have attained (and from their purer organization they could not fail of some) was by instinct rather than by reason. It has never till now been seen to be one of the two great wings that upbear the universe.” In the same letter he says: “The proof of poetry is, in my mind, whether it reduces to the essence of a single line the vague philosophy which is floating in all men’s minds, and so renders it portable and useful and ready to the hand. Is it not so? At least no poem ever makes me respect its author which does not in some way convey a truth of philosophy.”

In the same temper which produced “Prometheus,” he wrote what he regarded as in some way a companion piece, “A Glance behind the Curtain,” in which he imagines a conversation between Cromwell and Hampden. There is no seeming endeavor at characterization of either figure, dramatically, but the poem, which is an attempt to read Cromwell’s mind, is a stirring and indignant demand that Freedom shall do her perfect work.

“Freedom hath yet a work for me to do,” he makes Cromwell exclaim:--

“So speaks that inward voice which never yet
Spake falsely, when it urged the spirit on
To noble deeds for country and mankind.
And for success, I ask no more than this,--
To bear unflinching witness to the truth.
All true whole men succeed; for what is worth
Success’s name, unless it be the thought,
The inward surety, to have carried out
A noble purpose to a noble end,
Although it be the gallows or the block?
’Tis only Falsehood that doth ever need
These outward shows of gain to bolster her.”

Thus, in the guise of Cromwell, speaks the young man dimly conscious, in a travailing age, of work needing to be done, and stirred too by the high emotions of the woman he loved, yet not quite able to translate his vague desire to be a champion of Truth into deeds. To be sure, at the close of this poem he remembers that Cromwell was the friend of Milton,

“A man not second among those who lived
To show us that the poet’s lyre demands
An arm of tougher sinew than the sword.”

In the dreams of his youth I think he saw himself playing a part in the drama that was opening, and wondering how he could wield the pen so as to make it a weapon for slaying wrong or defending right. Yet direct as he might wish his attack to be, he was held back by an equally potent impulse to fulfil the demands of art. “A Chippewa Legend,” in this same volume, though used as a parable for an impassioned denunciation of slavery, has touches of nature in the unfolding of the story which show clearly how much delight he took in the story itself, and how easily he might have stopped short as a singer, if the preacher in him had not made the song turn out a sermon.

The autobiographic element in this volume of “Poems” is most distinctly summed up in a sonnet which dropped out of later collections containing most of the other poems. It bears the title “On my twenty-fourth Birthday, February 22, 1843,” and marks well his own sense of a certain transition which had taken place in his growth.

“Now have I quite passed by that cloudy If
That darkened the wild hope of boyish days,
When first I launched my slender-sided skiff
Upon the wide sea’s dim, unsounded ways;
Now doth Love’s sun my soul with splendor fill,
And Hope bath struggled upward into Power,
Soft Wish is hardened into sinewy Will,
And Longing into Certainty doth tower:
The love of beauty knoweth no despair;
My heart would break, if I should dare to doubt,
That from the Wrong, which makes its dragon’s lair
Here on the Earth, fair Truth shall wander out,
Teaching mankind, that Freedom’s held in fee
Only by those who labor to set free.”

In “A Year’s Life” the l’envoi of the volume is a timid poem, “Goe, little booke!” in which the poet, sending his venture out among strangers and most likely among apathetic readers, comforts himself with the reflection:--

“But, if all others are unkind,
There’s _one_ heart whither thou canst fly
For shelter from the biting wind;
And, in that home of purity,
It were no bitter thing to die.”

The “L’Envoi” of “Poems” is addressed to M. W. and is an open confession of the indebtedness of his love, three years after the veiled disclosure in “Ianthe,” “Irene,” “Isabel,” and other figurings of his affection, and runs like a golden thread through all the warp and woof of his imagination and fancy. In this serious poem, which he retained in his later collections, though without the declarative initials,[39] Lowell intimates very clearly that his maturer outlook on life, and his attitude toward poetry are due largely to the inspiration which he has derived from the aspirations of his betrothed. Not only has his love for her quickened his eye of faith, but he has caught a wider view and a firmer hold on the great realities of the spirit through the contagion of her lofty idealism and its fervent expression in a moral ardor. This is especially manifest in a long passage which has been omitted from the poem in later collections. There are portions of this omitted passage which are little better than a dissertation on the poet’s mission, and they were wisely dropped, but they drew after them by necessity a few verses which have an interest as recording in a candid fashion the change which had come over the poet’s mind in these three years just past. After the introductory lines, in which he speaks rather disdainfully of “A Year’s Life,” and intimates that he has grown a sadder and a wiser man, yet with no lessening of that trust in God which was so marked a characteristic of his betrothed, he goes on:--

“Less of that feeling which the world calls love,
Thou findest in my verse, but haply more
Of a more precious virtue, born of that,
The love of God, of Freedom, and of Man.
Thou knowest well what these three years have been,
How we have filled and graced each other’s hearts,
And every day grown fuller of that bliss,
Which, even at first, seemed more than we could bear,
And thou, meantime, unchanged, except it be
That thy large heart is larger, and thine eyes
Of palest blue, more tender with the love
Which taught me first how good it was to love;
And, if thy blessed name occur less oft,
Yet thou canst see the shadow of thy soul
In all my song, and art well-pleased to feel
That I could ne’er be rightly true to thee,
If I were recreant to higher aims.
Thou didst not grant to me so rich a fief
As thy full love, on any harder tenure
Than that of rendering thee a single heart;
And I do service for thy queenly gift
Then best, when I obey my soul, and tread
In reverence the path she beckons me.”

It would be joy enough, he proceeds, if he could so measure joy, to rest in this contentment of loving and being loved, but life had nobler destinies, and he rejoiced that she who gave him her love had a larger conception of poetry, and so he passes to an analysis of the true aims of poesy, which finally takes the turn of considering the possibility of satisfying these aims by rendering the landscape of America into verse,--

“They tell us that our land was made for song,”--

and so continues as preserved in the present form of the poem.

It will be seen thus that this volume of “Poems,” taken as a register of Lowell’s development, marks a greater sureness of himself, a more definite determination of aim, a confidence in powers whose precise range he cannot yet measure, and with all this a swaying now toward the expression of pure delight in art, now toward the use of his art for the accomplishment of some great purpose. It is noticeable, also, that in “A Year’s Life” there is no trace of humor and scarcely any singular felicity of phrase; in “Poems,” wit and humor begin to play a little on the surface. There can be little doubt that the direct influence of Maria White was toward what may without offence be called the practical issue, and this not because she was utilitarian--on the contrary, Lowell felt called on to defend her against the charge of being a transcendentalist, the charge implying a reproach as of a mere visionary; no, it was a certain high, even exalted and enthusiastic allegiance to Truth which dominated her nature, made her in a degree to accept this allegiance as sign of a mission which she was to fulfil, rendered her eager to have the close coöperation of her lover, and made him almost feverishly desirous of justifying her faith by his works. A letter which she wrote to Mr. Briggs, though it anticipates a little the course of this narrative, may be cited here as throwing some further light on her nature.

WATERTOWN, Dec. 12th, 1844.