Chapter VIII: An End and a Beginning (2)

Lowell again took passage in a sailing vessel, the St. Nicholas, Bragdon, master, which left New York 4 June, 1855, bound for Havre. Among his companions was Dr. Elliott, under whose care he had been a dozen years before, when his eyes were in a bad way. It was a four weeks’ voyage, and Lowell amused himself with Lever’s novels from beginning to end, as he lay stretched in a hammock on the quarter-deck. Reaching France, he spent three weeks in Paris among the pictures chiefly, and made an excursion to Chartres, apparently his first visit, but one which left so deep an impression on his mind that fourteen years later, when he wrote “The Cathedral,” which he wished at first to call “A Day at Chartres,” the same images which sprang to his mind when he wrote of his visit directly after in a letter to Mr. Norton, recurred and found poetic expression. “It is the home now,” he wrote, “of innumerable swallows and sparrows, who build upon the shoulders of those old great ones (the stone angels and saints)--as we little folks do too, I am afraid. Even here I found the Norman--for when I mounted to the spire, I saw numbers of hawks who dwell in the higher parts, as in their castles, and prey on the poor Saxons below.” So in the poem he takes a parting look

“At those old weather-pitted images
Of by-gone struggle, now so sternly calm.
About their shoulders sparrows had built nests,
And fluttered, chirping, from gray perch to perch,
Now on a mitre poising, now a crown,
Irreverently happy. While I thought
How confident they were, what careless hearts
Flew on those lightsome wings and shared the sun,
A larger shadow crossed; and looking up
I saw where, nesting in the hoary towers,
The sparrow-hawk slid forth on noiseless air,
With sidelong head that watched the joy below,
Grim Norman baron o’er this clan of Kelts.”

From Paris Lowell ran over to London, chiefly to see the Storys, who were there, and renewed his acquaintance with Thackeray and the Brownings, and fell in with Leigh Hunt. But his main business was to make himself proficient in German, and so having taken his academic vacation in advance, he journeyed through the Low Countries, and settled himself in Dresden for the autumn and winter. The quiet Saxon city was a favorite resort for Americans then even more than now, and for the first few weeks his sister, Mrs. Putnam, was there with her family. It was with a dull, heavy feeling that he gave himself to his tasks, seeing very little of society. “I confess frankly,” he wrote, shortly after his establishment there, “that I am good for nothing, and have been for some time, and that there are times almost every day when I wish to die, be out of the world once for all.... I fear I shall come back with my eremitical tendencies more developed than ever.” But dogged persistence in work was something better than an anodyne, and work hard he did. “A man of my age,” he wrote to his father, “has to study very hard in acquiring a new language, and I cannot be satisfied without knowing thoroughly all I undertake to know. I am very well and constantly busy.”

Mr. Norton with his sisters crossed the Atlantic in the autumn, and Lowell wrote to him at Paris: “Did I tell you that I had a room on the ground floor, with a glass door giving upon a large garden? that I have a flock of sparrows that come to breakfast with me every morning, and eat loaf sugar to the detriment of my coffee? That I go to hear lectures on the Natural Sciences and have even assisted at the anatomical class,--beginning with horror and ending with interest? That we have the best theatre here I ever saw? And by the way, if Bouffé acts the _Abbé Galant_ while you are in Paris, go and see it by all means. It is a truly artistic piece of representation. If it be not too cold, go down to Chartres. It is simply the best thing in France, and must have come out of some fine old Norman brain,--I am sure no Frenchman could ever have conceived it. After all, there are no such poets as the elements. Leave a thing to them, and they redress all imperfections and expunge all prose.”

He had planned spending a portion of his time in Spain, and took lessons in Spanish in Dresden, but finally abandoned the notion. His host and hostess, with whom he talked, assured him that he made astonishing progress in German. “What a language it is to be sure!” he wrote; “with nominatives sending out as many roots as that witch-grass which is the pest of all child-gardens, and sentences in which one sets sail like an admiral with sealed orders, not knowing, where the devil he is going to till he is in mid-ocean!” To his friend Stillman he wrote, as the winter wore away: “To say all in one word, I have been passing a very wretched winter. I have been out of health and out of spirits, gnawed a great part of the time by an insatiable homesickness, and deprived of my usual means of ridding myself of bad thoughts by putting them into verse, for I have always felt that I was here for the specific end of learning German, and not of pleasing myself.” Fifteen years later, looking back, he wrote: “I once spent a winter in Dresden, a southern climate compared with England, and really almost lost my respect for the sun when I saw him groping among the chimney-pots opposite my windows as he described his impoverished arc in the sky.”[104]

As spring drew on he was possessed with a longing for Italy, especially for the near friends who were there, his sister Mary who had left Dresden for Rome, the Storys, the Nortons, and others. He turned his face thitherward the first of March, meaning to be absent for two or three weeks only, but he was not back in Dresden till the beginning of June. “My journey in Italy,” he wrote to his father on his return, “was of much benefit to me. I spent a fortnight with Mary in Rome, went with her to Naples and spent another fortnight with her there. At Naples we parted. I went to Sicily and made the tour of the island, hoping to find Mary still in Naples when I returned. But Sicily required much more time than I had expected, and when I came back I found Mary gone back to Rome. I could not follow her thither, but took the steamer to Genoa, and so over the Alps back to Germany. I found Sicily very interesting in scenery and associations, and very saddening in its political aspect. I believe it is the worst governed country in Europe. With every advantage of climate and soil, it is miserably poor,--there are no roads, and vexatious restrictions repress trade in every direction. The people struck me as looking more depressed than any I have seen.”

His itinerary, to be a little more detailed, was to Venice, then by rail to Verona, and to Mantua. There he hired a vettura to take him to Parma, and in the same mode he went to Bologna, sleeping at Modena on the way. From Bologna he went to Ravenna and thence to Florence. He went to Siena by the slow, roundabout rail, and then was driven to Orvieto by Chiusi. At Orvieto he was greeted by Mr. Norton, Mr. Page, and Mr. John W. Field, who had come out to meet him and to escort him to Rome. On his return from Genoa he made a stop at Nuremberg. He lingered in Dresden a few weeks, made another brief stay in Paris, and was once more in Cambridge, in August, 1856.

* * * * *

On his return from Europe Lowell did not resume life at Elmwood, but took up his quarters with his brother-in-law, Dr. Estes Howe, on

Kirkland Street, in Cambridge. Longfellow was in his summer home at Nahant, and Lowell ran down to see him, looking, as the elder poet notes in his diary, “as if he had not been gone a week.” He took renewed delight in his country walks, and tingled afresh at contact with nature. “How I do love the earth!” he writes to Mr. Norton, who was still in Europe. “I feel it thrill under my feet. I feel somehow as if it were conscious of my love, as if something passed into my dancing blood from it, and I get rid of that duty-feeling,--‘What right have I to be?’--and not a goldenrod of them all soaks in the sunshine or feels the blue currents of the air eddy about him more thoughtlessly than I.”

The college year opened a few weeks after his return, and he began his duties by repeating the course of lectures which he had delivered before the Lowell Institute the winter of 1855, before taking up his more specific work in German literature and Dante.

It was in the teaching of Dante that Lowell made the strongest impression on the students who gathered about him, if we may judge by the reminiscences which more than one has printed; and the methods he adopted in his teaching never greatly varied, for he came to the work of teaching without any specific training, when he had been nearly twenty years out of college, and when the kind of interest in literature, which in his college days had disputed for supremacy with the docile habit of the schoolboy, had now become confirmed by study, by travel, and by his own productions.

In an address which he gave in 1889 before the Modern Language Association of America, he recorded his judgment on the vexed question of the distribution of emphasis upon the philological and the æsthetic pursuit of the study of literature. It was twelve years since he had discontinued the practice of teaching, and it is reasonable to infer that he was distilling in a few sentences the experience which his method of study and his method of teaching recalled to him.

“In reading such books,” he says, “as chiefly deserve to be read in any foreign language, it is wise to translate consciously and in words as we read. There is no such help to a fuller mastery of our vernacular. It compels us to such a choosing and testing, to so nice a discrimination of sound, propriety, position, and shade of meaning, that we now first learn the secret of the words we have been using or misusing all our lives, and are gradually made aware that to set forth even the plainest matter as it should be set forth is not only a very difficult thing, calling for thought and practice, but an affair of conscience as well. Translating teaches us as nothing else can, not only that there is a best way, but that it is the only way.”

Again, in the same address, thinking no doubt of the expansion of the curriculum at Harvard, even since he laid aside the teacher’s gown: “We have every reason to congratulate ourselves on the progress the modern languages have made as well in academic as in popular consideration. They are now taught (as they could not formerly be taught) in a way that demands toil and thought of the student, as Greek and Latin, and they only, used to be taught, and they also open the way to higher intellectual joys, to pastures new, and not the worse for being so, as Greek and Latin, and they only, used to do.... If I did not rejoice in the wonderful advance made in the comparative philology of the modern languages, I should not have the face to be standing here. But neither should I if I shrank from saying what I believed to be the truth, whether here or elsewhere. I think that the purely linguistic side in the teaching of them seems in the way to get more than its fitting share. I insist only that in our college courses this should be a separate study, and that, good as it is in itself, it should, in the scheme of general instruction, be restrained to its own function as the guide to something better, and that something better is Literature. The blossoms of language have certainly as much value as its roots, for if the roots secrete food and thereby transmit life to the plant, yet the joyous consummation of that life is in the blossoms, which alone bear the seeds that distribute and renew it in other growths. Exercise is good for the muscles of mind and to keep it well in hand for work, but the true end of Culture is to give it play, a thing quite as needful. What I would urge, therefore, is that no invidious distinction should be made between the Old Learning and the New, but that students, due regard being had to their temperaments and faculties, should be encouraged to take the course in modern languages as being quite as good in point of mental discipline as any other, if pursued with the same thoroughness and to the same end. And that end is Literature, for there language first attains to a full consciousness of its powers and to the delighted exercise of them. Literature has escaped that doom of Shinar which made our Association possible, and still everywhere speaks in the universal tongue of civilized man.”

Lowell’s office did not require of him elementary instruction in modern languages, nor indeed was it expected that he should do drill work in linguistics. There were competent instructors then in the several languages, some of whom afterward came to be eminent professors, as the department was divided. He was not indifferent in the choice of assistants, but once they were at work he left them to their own devices, and exercised the slightest sort of supervision of them. There was no very nice division of labor, except that, as I have said, these assistants took the more exact grammatical details, yet they all included more or less of literature in their work with students. It can hardly be said that Lowell did more than flavor his instruction of literature with a pinch of grammar. Words in their origin and changing meanings he did comment on, but inflections, paradigms, and all the apparatus of grammar formed no part of his interest in his work.

In his essay on “Shakespeare Once More” he has said: “There would be no dispute about the advantages of that Greek culture which Schiller advocated with such generous eloquence, if the great authors of antiquity had not been degraded from teachers of thinking to drillers in grammar, and made the ruthless pedagogues of root and inflection, instead of companions for whose society the mind must put on her highest mood.... There is much that is deciduous in books, but all that gives them a title to rank as literature, in the highest sense, is perennial. Their vitality is the vitality not of one or another blood or tongue, but of human nature; their truth is not topical and transitory, but of universal acceptation; and thus all great authors seem the coevals not only of each other, but of whoever reads them, growing wiser with him as he grows wise, and unlocking to him one secret after another as his own life and experience give him the key, but on no other condition.”

Now Lowell’s own interest in literature had been direct. It would be idle to say that literature was interesting or valuable to him only so far as it was a criticism of life. It would be equally idle to say that his pleasure in it was derived only from his perception of it as great art. He carried to it the same kind of interest which he carried into his own production of literature. He was at once full of that human sense which made him delight in a fine expression of humanity, and he had the craftsman’s pleasure in excellent work, so that on the one hand, though in his youth he raged against Pope, in his more mature judgment he rejoiced in the patience in careful finish which characterized him: and, on the other hand, he gave himself with the fullest abandonment to an admiration of Dante as “the highest spiritual nature that has expressed itself in rhythmical form.” He thought him “the first great poet who ever made a poem wholly out of himself.” In one of his unpublished lectures Lowell uses Dante as a text for a discourse on the pursuit of literature, and mingles with it a slight element of autobiography, which makes it specially fitting to repeat the passage here:--

“One is sometimes asked by young men to recommend to them a course of reading. My advice would always be to confine yourself to the supreme books in whatever literature; still better, to choose some one great author and grow thoroughly familiar with him. For as all roads lead to Rome, so they all likewise lead thence; and you will find that in order to understand perfectly and weigh exactly any really vital piece of literature, you will be gradually and pleasantly persuaded to studies and explorations of which you little dreamed when you began, and will find yourselves scholars before you are aware. If I may be allowed a personal illustration, it was my own profound admiration for the ‘Divina Commedia’ of Dante that lured me into what little learning I possess. For remember that there is nothing less fruitful than scholarship for the sake of mere scholarship, nor anything more wearisome in the attainment. But the moment you have an object and a centre, attention is quickened, the mother of memory; and whatever you acquire groups and arranges itself in an order which is lucid because it is everywhere in intelligent relation to an object of constant and growing interest. Thus, as respects Dante, I asked myself, What are his points of likeness or unlikeness with the authors of classical antiquity? in how far is either of these an advantage or defect? What and how much modern literature had preceded him? How much was he indebted to it? How far had the Italian language been subdued and suppled to the uses of poetry or prose before his time? How much did he color the style or thought of the authors who followed him? Is it a fault or a merit that he is so thoroughly impregnated with the opinions, passions, and even prejudices not only of his age but his country? Was he right or wrong in being a Ghibelline? To what extent is a certain freedom of opinion which he shows sometimes on points of religious doctrine to be attributed to the humanizing influences of the Crusades in enlarging the horizon of the Western mind by bringing it in contact with other races, religions, and social arrangements? These and a hundred other such questions were constant stimulants to thought and inquiry, stimulants such as no merely objectless and, so to speak, impersonal study could have supplied.”

When, therefore, Lowell was brought face to face with a company of young men, in the relation of teacher, he appears not to have cast about to see how he could adjust his powers to some prevailing method of teaching, but to have used the material of literature as an instrument of association, and naturally, untrammelled by pedagogic theory, to have tried to communicate to the minds about him the kind of interest which the literature he was handling inspired in him. So far was he from a professional teacher that it is doubtful if he individualized his students much, or made any attempt to find entrance into this or that mind by first trying to detect what opening the mind offered. Undoubtedly, one or another with special aptitude or appreciation may have stimulated him and quickened his faculty of instruction, but for the most part these young men gave him the occasion for utterance, and the text before him gave the theme of discourse. Mr. Barrett Wendell, in his illuminating paper on Lowell as a teacher, confesses with a generous chagrin, that though he had been an enthusiastic pupil and had used Lowell’s hospitality fully, the acquaintance was very one-sided. He came to know Lowell well, but Lowell when he met him again after no great interval of time, had quite forgotten his face, and almost forgotten his name.[105]

Though he could scarcely be said to have resorted to any set or customary methods of a professional sort, he was not without recourse to simple aids in his teaching. “Thirty odd years ago,” he wrote in 1889,[106] “I brought home with me from Nuremberg photographs of Peter Fischer’s statuettes of the twelve apostles. These I used to show to my pupils and ask for a guess at their size. The invariable answer was ‘larger than life.’ They were really about eighteen inches high, and this grandiose effect was wrought by simplicity of treatment, dignity of pose, a large unfretted sweep of drapery. This object lesson I found more telling than much argument and exhortation.” He made also some attempt, when the method was much more of a novelty than it is to-day, to bring in the aid of illustration from art. He interested himself to rid his class-room in University Hall of some dismal charts that hung on the walls, and brought down from Elmwood a number of engravings and photographs which he had collected in his travels abroad, especially illustrations of Florence and Rome; one year he presented each of his class who had persevered with a copy of the recently discovered portrait of Dante by Giotto; and again he gave to each of his small class in Dante a copy of Mr. Norton’s privately printed volume on the “New Life.”

The actual exercise in the class-room was simple enough and unconventional. The classes were not large, and the relation of the teacher to his students was that of an older friend who knew in a large way the author they were studying, and drew upon his own knowledge and familiarity with the text for comment and suggestion, rather than troubled himself much to find out how much his pupils knew. A student would trudge blunderingly along some passage, and Lowell would break in, taking up the translation himself very likely, and quickly find some suggestion for criticism, for elaboration or incidental and remote comment. Toward the close of the hour, question and answer, or free discussion yielded to the stream of personal reminiscence or abundant reflection upon which Lowell would by this time be launched. Especially would he recall scenes in Florence, sketch in words the effects of the Arno, Giotto’s Tower, the church in which Dante was baptized, where he himself had seen children held at the same font; and so Lowell gave out of his treasures, using that form of literature which was perhaps the most perfectly fitted to his mind, free, unconstrained talk. Suddenly, glancing at his watch before him,--a time-piece which was as idly whimsical as its owner,--he would stop, bow and walk quickly out of the room, the men rising respectfully as he left.

And the listeners? They went away, a few carelessly amused at the loose scholastic exercise and complacent over the evasion of work, but some stirred, quickened in their thought, and full of admiration for this brilliant interpreter of life as seen through the verse of Dante. One charm was in the unexpectedness of it all. There was no predicting what direction his talk would take. “Now and again,” says Mr. Wendell, “some word or some passage would suggest to him a line of thought--sometimes very earnest, sometimes paradoxically comical--that it never would have suggested to any one else; and he would lean back in his chair, and talk away across country till he felt like stopping; or he would thrust his hands into the pockets of his rather shabby sack-coat, and pace the end of the room with his heavy laced boots, and look at nothing in particular, and discourse of things in general.”

The formalities of academic work were of little concern to Lowell. To be sure, after the first year of neglect he yielded to Dr. Walker’s persuasion, and attended Faculty meetings with commendable regularity, and took his share in the little details of discipline which were gravely discussed. It must have brought a smile to his mind, if not to his face, when he found himself called upon to join in a public admonition of ----, junior, “for wearing an illegal coat after repeated warnings.” And examinations of his classes were wearisome functions. “Perhaps,” says Mr. Wendell, “from unwillingness to degrade the text of Dante to such use, Mr. Lowell set us, when we had read the Inferno and part of the Purgatorio, a paper consisting of nothing but a long passage from Massimo d’Azeglio, which we had three hours to translate. This task we performed as best we might. Weeks passed, and no news came of our marks. At last one of the class, who was not quite at ease concerning his academic standing, ventured at the close of a recitation to ask if Mr. Lowell had assigned him a mark. Mr. Lowell looked at the youth very gravely, and inquired what he really thought his work deserved. The student rather diffidently said that he hoped it was worth sixty per cent. ‘You may take it,’ said Mr. Lowell, ‘I don’t want the bother of reading your book.’”

Nevertheless, indifferent as he may have been to the customary details of academic work, and not a little impatient of dry formalities, Lowell gave to the college liberally of the best he had to give. Not merely did he go through with his appointed tasks; he was always ready to take additional labor on himself and to perform works of supererogation. He had men come to read with him in his house, and one season at least offered to conduct a group of divinity students through the Inferno. It must be remembered, moreover, that Lowell’s instruction was of two sorts, one in a special author or group, to small select classes, the other general lectures upon literature to large classes. Something of the character of his free handling of subjects may be seen in the extracts from these lectures preserved in _The Harvard Crimson_ in 1894; and the attitude which he took toward this side of his work is recorded in the introductory passage to a lecture on the Study of Literature.

“I confess,” he says, “it is with more and more diffidence that I rise every year to have my little talk with you about books and the men that have written them. If I remember my terrestrial globe rightly, one gets into his temperate zone after passing the parallel of forty, and arrives at that, shall I call it, Sheltered Haven of Middle Age, when, in proportion as one is more careful of the conclusions he arrives at, he is less zealous in his desire that all mankind should agree with him. Moreover, the longer one studies, the more thoroughly does one persuade himself that till he knows everything, he knows nothing--that after twenty years of criticism, one is still a mere weigher and gauger: skilled only to judge what he may chance to have been in the habit of inspecting at his own little provincial custom-house. And as one gets older he is apt to allow more for personal idiosyncrasy, and to have less certainty that the truth he had reached is not a one-sided one, and that there are not fifty others equally important, and (perhaps) equally unsatisfactory. Every bait is not for every fish. We begin by admitting the old doctor’s apothegm that Art is long; we gradually become persuaded that it is like the Irishman’s rope, the other end of which was cut off. So different is Art, whose concern is with the ideal and potential, from Science, which is limited by the actual and positive. Life is so short that it may be fairly doubted whether any man has a right to talk an hour, and I have learned at least so much,--that I hope less to teach than to suggest.”

The tone of distrustfulness which is an undercurrent in this passage is familiar enough to the conscientious teacher, and Lowell, measuring the vastness of literature and his own inadequacy to press it home to his students, was fearful that the outcome was slight in proportion to the cost to himself. Yet he did not therefore spare himself. During the years of his teaching, he was more than ever the scholar, taking generous draughts of the literature he was to teach, for long stretches of time even engaged with his books twelve hours out of the twenty-four. And so quickening was his imagination that he went to his classes not to decant the wine of learning from bottles just filled, but to give them of his own rare essence distilled from the hours of study. Hence he was a strong and vivifying influence to the best men under him, and to all he communicated something of that rich culture which is not easily measured by lessons learned and recited. No one could listen to his teaching, as has been well said, without becoming conscious that he was listening to a man not less wise than accomplished and gifted.

In this matter of teaching, as in all the other undertakings of his life, Lowell kept no strict debit and credit account. He gave his measure not according to the stipulated return, but freely, generously. Especially did he overflow in friendliness. As he turned the lecture and recitation hour into a _causerie_, and was careless in his exactions, so he not only suffered but encouraged encroachment on his unprofessional hours. At first in Kirkland Street, afterward at Elmwood, he made his students welcome, and the only difference it may be between an hour in University Hall and an hour by the wood fire at Elmwood, was in the wider range of talk. It was here that his students came nearest to him, for it was the men he quickened in the class-room who were avid of more just such talk, and sought him in the greater intimacy of his study. Yet, nearer as they came to him as he sat with his pipe in slippered ease, and much as they drew from him, it is doubtful if there was much reciprocity in the intercourse. As a comparative stranger might draw from Lowell one of his most delightful letters, if some question he sent him happened to catch him at a favorable moment, when he needed only an occasion for the letter that was on tap, so these students, one or more, offered an easy audience, and Lowell, rarely out of the mood for talk, would spin his gossamer or weave his strong fabric for them as well as for any one else, without paying very close heed to them personally. In fine, the twenty years of college work made little inroad on Lowell himself. He was furnished with occupation, he was made comparatively easy in his simple need of a livelihood, and for the rest his class-room work offered a natural outlet for his abundant intellectual activity. He grumbled sometimes over its demands on his time, but it is doubtful if the reading world would have had very much more from him had he never been subject to this demand. It is even quite possible that the work kept him very much more alive than he might otherwise have been, saving him from a species of intellectual luxury of an unproductive sort; it is certain that the hours added thus to his other productive time were a stimulus and inspiration to many men, and that as a practical matter the work done for his classes in the way of direct preparation was the foundation of a good deal of his published criticism.

And yet it is not so certain that his mood for poetry was helped by his academic life. He wrote to Mr. Stillman 14 May, 1857: “While my lectures are on my mind I am not myself, and I seem to see all the poetry drying out of me. I droop on my rocks and hear the surge of the living waters, but they will not reach me till some extraordinary springtide, and maybe not then.” It is true, this expression must not be pressed too hardly--it may have been only the mood of the moment; but it is evident that the time of freedom in poetic composition had largely passed for him; it returned once and again, as for instance in “Agassiz” and the “Commemoration Ode,” it was compelled for him by the occasion which drew out the second series of the “Biglow Papers,” but for the most part his poetry after this date bears rather more the touch of deliberation and less the abandon of his early enthusiasm. How far this is to be referred to the circumstance of the constraint of academic work, and how far to the change which came over his life in the passage from ebullient youth to chastened manhood one would not care to say. But the period of his next twenty years was the period of prose in his production.

The regular, punctual life which the daily college exercise demands came as a steadying influence after the vagrancy and informality of the previous years, and now there was added the gracious and helpful presence of a self-contained, sympathetic, congenial woman. Mrs. Lowell, before her death, had wished her daughter to be under the oversight of an intimate friend, Miss Elizabeth Dunlap, but before the arrangements could be completed, Miss Dunlap died, and her sister Frances took the place and had had charge of Mabel Lowell ever since her father had left America for his year of study in Germany. He had thought himself most fortunate in making the arrangement, and the friendly intercourse which naturally sprang from this relation ripened steadily into affection. In September, 1857, they were married, and now he was enabled to resume the old life at Elmwood.

One or two passages from letters written at this time by Lowell to Mr. Norton give a glimpse of this new relation: “I have told you once or twice that I should not be married again if I could help it. The time has come when I cannot. A great many things (which I cannot write about) have conspired to bring me to this resolution, and I rejoice in it, for I feel already stronger and better, with an equability of mind that I have not felt for years.”[107] “I was glad as I could be to get your heartily sympathizing letter. I had taken a step of great import to my life and character, and though I am careless of Mrs. Grundy’s sentiments on the occasion, I do care intensely for the opinion of the few friends whom I value. With its personal results to myself I am more than satisfied, and I was convinced of the wisdom of what I was about to do before I did it. I already begin to feel like my old self again in health and spirits, and feel secure now, if I die, of leaving Mabel to wise and loving government. So intimate an acquaintance as mine has been with Miss Dunlap for nearly four years has made me know and love her, and she certainly must know me well enough to be safe in committing her happiness to my hands.... I went down last week to Portland to make the acquaintance of her family, and like them, especially her mother, who is a person of great character. They live in a little bit of a house in a little bit of a street, behind the great house (the biggest in town) in which they were brought up, and not one of them seemed conscious that they were not welcoming me to a palace. There were no apologies for want of room, no Dogberry hints at losses, nor anything of that kind, but all was simple, ladylike, and hearty. A family of girls who expected to be rich, and have had to support themselves and (I suspect) their mother in part, are not likely to have any nonsense in them. I find Miss Dunlap’s education very complete in having had the two great teachers, Wealth and Poverty--one has taught not to value money, the other to be independent of it.”[108] “I am more and more in love with Fanny, whose nature is so delightfully cheerful that it is impossible for me to get into the dumps even if I wished.”[109]

Mr. Stillman, a keen observer, has given a good estimate of Mrs. Lowell’s nature in these words: “She was one of the rarest and most sympathetic creatures I have ever known. She was the governess of Lowell’s daughter, when I first went to stay at Elmwood, and I then felt the charm of her character. She was a sincere Swedenborgian, with the serene faith and spiritual outlook I have generally found to be characteristic of that sect; with a warmth of spiritual sympathy of which I have known few so remarkable instances; a fine and subtle faculty of appreciation, serious and tender, which was to Lowell like an enfolding of the Divine Spirit. The only particular in which the sympathy failed was in the feeling that she had in regard to his humorous poems. She disliked the vein. It was not that she lacked humor or the appreciation of his, but she thought that kind of literature unworthy of him. This she said to me more than once. But, aside from this, she fitted him like the air around him. He had felt the charm of her character before he went to Europe, and had begun to bend to it; but as he said to me after his marriage, he would make no sign till he had tested by a prolonged absence the solidity of the feeling he had felt growing up. He waited, therefore, till his visit to Germany had satisfied him that it was sympathy, and not propinquity, that lay at the root of his inclination for her, before declaring himself. No married life could be more fortunate in all respects except one--they had no children. But for all that his life required she was to him healing from sorrow and a defence against all trouble, a very spring of life and hope.”[110]

Mr. Howells also, who first knew her a decade later, has sketched her in these lines: “She was a woman perfectly of the New England type and tradition: almost repellently shy at first, and almost glacially cold with new acquaintance, but afterward very sweet and cordial. She was of a dark beauty, with a regular face of the Spanish outline; Lowell was of an ideal manner toward her, and of an admiration which delicately travestied itself and which she knew how to receive with smiling irony.”[111] Mrs. Herrick, in an unpublished reminiscence, speaks of her in similar terms: “She was a noble and beautiful woman eminently practical in all the affairs of life. Commanding in presence, gracious in her hospitality, highly cultured, and full of a keen appreciation of every word of Mr. Lowell, and always charming and womanly.”

Stillman’s tender sketch of Mrs. Lowell brings to mind that it was in the summer of his marriage that Lowell joined this friend in a reconnaissance of the Adirondacks which was followed by the formation of the Adirondack Club, and the successive sojourns in the wilderness which Emerson has enshrined in his poem “The Adirondacs,” and Stillman himself has recorded delightfully in his Autobiography as well as in magazine articles.[112]

“Ten men, ten guides, our company all told,”

says Emerson, but his chronicle was of the next year when the club was fully organized, and Stillman, Emerson, Lowell, Jeffries Wyman, E. R. Hoar, Dr. Howe, Binney, Woodman, Agassiz, and John Holmes, went into the wilderness. In 1857, the tentative exploring party; led by Stillman, consisted of John Holmes, Dr. Estes Howe, Lowell, and his two nephews, Charles and James Lowell, forever immortalized in the passionate verse of the second “Biglow Papers.” Lowell, who had known the near charms of nature in the Waverley Oaks and Beaver Brook, and had tasted the wild wood in his Maine excursion, entered with frolic delight into this forest picnic. The conditions were such as to bring out the best that was in him, for he had the freedom of the woods and the satisfaction of congenial society. “He was the soul,” says Stillman, “of the merriment of the company, fullest of witticisms, keenest in appreciation of the liberty of the occasion and the _genius loci_.... Not even Emerson, with all his indifference to the mere form of things, took to unimproved and uncivilized nature as Lowell did, and his free delight in the Wilderness was a thing to remember.” To these companions, quick to appreciate and respond, Lowell, light-hearted with the new promise of happiness and set free in his mind by the large privacy of the woods, brought the treasures of his fancy, his wit, his imagination. He revelled especially in recounting those visionary experiences which seemed all the more real under the starry skies and in the companionship of trees and silent forest creatures. Yet with it all, his inquisitive, searching mind, quickened too by the presence of scientific and philosophic comrades, was forever probing these phenomena to discover what was their ultimate rationale.

There can be little doubt that at this period of his life Lowell was poised for flight, as it were, having reached a stage when all the conditions were most favorable for the full expression of his powers. It is true that his academic work, as I have said, did in a measure supplant a freer poetic movement. But it may not unfairly be affirmed that Lowell’s attitude toward poetry was always that of expectation of some greater gift to come. His poems “Fancy’s Casuistry,” “In the Twilight,” “To the Muse,” all written about this time, record with iteration his restless pursuit of the elusive dream. His academic work afforded indeed a daily outlet, but it could not satisfy the demand for expression. Best of all, there was a pleasure-house in which he dwelt with his wife and daughter, perfectly fitted to the contentment of his spirit, and to furnishing that ease of mind which gives health of nature. Stillman has in another passage drawn a picture which may well be given here in evidence.

“Lowell was indeed very happy in his married life, and amongst the pictures Memory will keep on her tablet for me, till Death passes his sponge over it once for all, is one of his wife lying in a long chair under the trees at Dr. Howe’s, when the sun was getting cool, and laughing with her low, musical laugh at a contest in punning between Lowell and myself, _haud passibus æquis_, but in which he found enough to provoke his wit to activity; her almost Oriental eyes twinkling with fun, half-closed and flashing from one to the other of us; her low, sweet forehead, wide between the temples; mouth wreathing with humor; and the whole frame, lithe and fragile, laughing with her eyes at his extravagant and rollicking word-play. One would hardly have said that she was a beautiful woman, but fascinating she was in the happiest sense of the word, with all the fascination of pure and perfect womanhood and perfect happiness.”