Chapter IX: The Atlantic Monthly (2)

“I am at last even with my manuscripts,” he wrote to another friend. “It is splendid. Such a heap as had gathered. It had snowed poems and tales and essays, and an eddy had drifted them into my study knee-deep. But I have shovelled myself out, and hope ’tis the last great storm of the season. I even found time to go to Dresel’s concert last evening, where I saw one of your cousins. The concert was nearly all Mendelssohn and seemed to me a little vague and cloudy--beautiful clouds, rose tinted and--indefinite. I longed for a good riving flash of Italian lightning. Fanny liked it, however, but I was rather bored. It seemed to me like reading manuscripts titillated with promise continually and finding no egregious and satisfying fulfilment.”

“Don’t come this way again,” he writes to Mr. White, “without letting me know you are coming. I want a talk with you, and I can’t talk by letter, for I can’t write them when I am tired, and I am tired all the time. If there be any truth in the doctrine of compensations, the bobolinks in some other stage of existence will all be caged in Grub Street and made editors. They are altogether too happy here. Well, maybe we shall be bobolinks. If ever we should be, I can show you a fine meadow for building in, a kind of grassy Venice with good tussock foundations jutting everywhere from the water.”

After something more than a year’s experience, he wrote to Mr. Norton: “I am resolved that no motive of my own comfort or advantage shall influence me, but I hate the turmoil of such affairs, despise the notoriety they give one, and long for the day when I can be vacant to the Muses and to my books for their own sakes. I cannot stand the worry of it much longer without a lieutenant. To have questions of style, grammar, and punctuation in other people’s articles to decide, while I want all my concentration for what I am writing myself--to have added to this personal appeals, from ill-mannered correspondents whose articles have been declined, to attend to--to sit at work sometimes fifteen hours a day, as I have done lately--makes me nervous, takes away my pluck, compels my neglecting my friends, and induces the old fits of the blues.”[127]

“If my letters seem dry,” he wrote again to Mr. White, “it is no fault of mine. I am overworked and overworried and overinterrupted. I _can’t_ write a genial letter, but I want you and like you all the same. If ever I get back to my old nest among the trees at Elmwood, and I am no longer professor or editor, with time enough to follow up a doubtful passage in Shakespeare or a bit of dilettante philology,--then what pleasure I should have in corresponding with you and exchanging thoughts and suggestions. But now, if anything occurs to me, I feel too tired to communicate it to anybody, for my days are so broken that I am forced sometimes to sit up till the birds sing to get any time for my own studies.”

In one point of excellence Lowell was exceedingly particular. He told me once in later life, when we were discussing a proposed reissue of the British Poets, of which he was to be editor-in-chief, that I must not think he would accept any one’s proof-reading but his own. “I am really a very careful proof-reader,” he said, “though people fancy I am too indolent for such work.” In a letter to Mr. Norton, 18 October, 1859, presaging some changes, he writes: “As to proofs, I _must_ read those myself, or I don’t feel safe. Yet a piece of bad grammar got into the October number in spite of Mr. Nichols and me together.” He had, indeed, a most admirable aid in Mr. George Nichols, who was a vigilant officer, carrying a search warrant for any and all literary misdemeanors. The _Atlantic_ at this time was printed at Riverside, and there is a charming description, in a letter which Mr. Norton prints,[128] of the morning walk which Lowell was wont to take to the Press by the footpath that lay along the river bank.

The pressure upon Lowell, which his college work and his editorship brought, did, during these four years, stop, somewhat, his spontaneity. He wrote but few poems, and his letters show the effort he needed to make to force some gayety. “I am that man among mortals,” he wrote to Miss Norton, “whose friends must forgive him the most treasons against friendship,--silence, staying away, dulness when he writes or comes--and I know not what else,--yet I do believe that my heart holds fire as long as another, and that I neither grow cool nor forget sooner than most. I cannot write unless I feel as if I could give the best part of myself to those who deserve it best, and I am so forever busy that I am either employed or weary, and who can write then? I believe that none but an idle man can write a good letter. I mean by idle, a man who is not under the necessity of tapping his brain on the public side, and tapping so freely that the runnings on the other cannot be sprightly for want of _head_. This is why women are such good letter-writers. Their ordinary employments do not suck them dry of all communicativeness,--I can’t think of any other word,--and their writing is their play, as it should be. As for me, nowadays, taking up my pen is only the reminder of work. This that I write with is one worn to a stump with my lectures three years--four years ago. I would not write with the same one I had used for Mr. Cushing and drudgery. So the fault is not in the quill that I am stupid. If I had only been laid away in a drawer these four years, as it had been! What a fury I should be in to declare myself on all manner of topics! But this exhaustion one feels from overwork extends itself to the receptive faculties as well. A dry sponge floats and is long in saturating. The mind, I think, goes even beyond this--it must be _full_ to take up more.”

The diversions which Lowell found in this period were not many. He made his yearly excursion to the Adirondacks, always looking forward eagerly to it, and working furiously just before home-leaving, that he might go with some serenity of mind. He saw scarcely anything of social life in Cambridge or Boston;[129] he went frequently to Shady Hill, the home of the Nortons, but nowhere else to speak of, and he found true relaxation in his whist club. Aside from all this, he derived most entertainment from the very informal clubs, with their dinners, which had sprung chiefly out of the establishment of the _Atlantic_. For a short time, apparently, there were two of these loose organizations, the Atlantic Club, so called, which was the gathering of the contributors at dinner, under the auspices of the publishers, during the first months of strong interest,--dinners which seem to have sprung from the little one given by Mr. Phillips at the institution of the magazine; and the Saturday Club, which still survives, a dining club, made up at first chiefly of literary men naturally connected with the _Atlantic_, and of congenial spirits, some of whom never and some rarely contributed. This latter club appears, after a while, to have supplanted the former. “Dined with the _Atlantic Monthly_ people,” Longfellow writes in his diary, 21 December, 1857, and again, 14 May, 1859, “Dined with the Atlantic Club, at Fondarivés’s. The ‘Atlantic’ is not the ‘Saturday’ club, though many members belong to both;” and on 9 July, 1859, he again notes that he dined with the Atlantic Club at the Revere House, but the references cease at this point, and the club dinners which he attends afterward are Saturday Club dinners, held on the last Saturday of the month at Parker’s Hotel. Dr. Holmes also, in later years, found the flourishing Saturday Club so constant in his recollection that he was disposed to deny the existence of any Atlantic Club. Properly speaking there never was any club, but only occasional dinners to which contributors were invited by the publishers. It was of one of the Saturday Club dinners that Lowell wrote 11 October, 1858: “You were good enough to tell me I might give you an account of our dinner. There at least was a topic, but I find that when I am full of work, I do not see the men I go among, but only shadows which make no impression. It is odd that when one’s mind is excited by writing so that one cannot sleep, one should see in the same way a constant succession of figures without really seeing them. They come and change and go without any dependence on the will, without any relation to the preoccupying thought.

“I remember one good thing at our last dinner. The dinner was for Stillman, and I proposed that Judge Hoar should propose his health in a speech. ‘_Sir!_’ (a long pause) ‘in what I have already said, I believe I speak the sentiments of every gentleman present, and lest I should fail to do so in what I might further say’--(another pause) ‘I sit down.’ And two days before at Agassiz’--the Autocrat giving an account of his having learned the fiddle, his brother John who sat opposite, exclaimed, ‘I can testify to it; he has often fiddled me out of the house as Orpheus did Eurydice out of the infernal regions.’ Isn’t that good? It makes me laugh to look at it now that I have written it down. The Autocrat relating how Simmons the Oak Hall man had sent him the two finest pears--‘of trowsers?’ interrupted somebody. But can one send poured-out Champagne all the way to Newport, and hope that one bubble will burst after it gets there to tell what it used to be? A dinner is never a good thing the next day. For the moment, though, what is better? We dissolve our pearls and drink them nobly--if we have them--but bring none away. A good talk is almost as much out of the question among clever men as among men who think themselves clever. Creation in pairs proves the foreordained superiority of the _tête-a-tête_. Nevertheless, we live and dine and die.” And a few months later he recorded a bit about a dinner of the Atlantic people, which has had more than one raconteur. “Our dinner the other day was very pleasant. Only Mrs. Stowe and Miss Prescott, author of ‘In a Cellar.’ She is very nice and bright. Mrs. Stowe would not let us have any wine, and I told her that I was sorry she should deprive herself of so many pleasant dinners in England (whither she goes 3d August) by so self-denying an ordinance. She _took_ at once, colored a little, laughed, and asked me to order some champagne.”

Perhaps the very necessity for constant criticism, whether unrecorded, as where he determined the grounds for acceptance and rejection of manuscripts, or in his correspondence with contributors, and his own articles in the magazine, tended to stimulate Lowell’s critical faculty. At any rate, in the midst of his busy hours he would now and then yield to the impulse, created by some current publication it may be, and give expression to judgments, either publicly or in his letters to friends. Thus his interest in “The Minister’s Wooing” led him not only into writing the letter to Mrs. Stowe, already noticed, but into a careful, unsigned analysis of Mrs. Stowe’s power in the _New York Tribune_.[130]

In August, 1859, Mr. Phillips, the publisher, died. Lowell characterized him as a man of great energy and pluck; but during the months previous to his death Mr. Phillips had by no means been in sound health, and had fretted much over complications in his affairs. He seems to have had reason, for a few weeks after the death of Mr. Phillips, the firm of Phillips & Sampson suspended payment, and went into the hands of an assignee, Mr. Harvey Jewell. “What is to come, or why they have done it,” Lowell wrote to Mr. Norton, “I cannot conjecture. I trust arrangements will be made to put the _Atlantic_ in good hands. _That_ at least is a paying thing. If it shall end in my losing the editorship, it would cause me little regret, for it would leave me more time to myself.” The assignee brought out the October number of the magazine, pending the settlement of affairs, and there was a lively competition among publishers to secure the publication. The Harpers proposed to buy it, to suppress their rival, it was said; there were offers from Philadelphia, and some of the younger men connected with the firm of Phillips & Sampson made an effort to establish a new firm which should buy the whole business of Phillips & Sampson, including the magazine. Mr. William Lee, who had left a large sum with the firm when he withdrew from it, was at the time travelling in Europe, and by a series of mischances did not even learn of the situation till it was too late for him to have a hand in any reorganization. There was even a plan mooted by which Lowell and his friends should buy the magazine, but Lowell’s own judgment was against this. “It ought,” he said, “to be in the hands of a practical publisher for we should be in danger of running aground.”

In the end, Ticknor & Fields bought the magazine. “As friend to friend,” Lowell wrote to Mr. Norton, I may say that I think it just the best arrangement possible, though I did not like to say so beforehand too plainly. I did not wish in any way to stand in ----’s light, but it is much better as it is. Whether T. will want _me_ or not, is another question. I suppose that he will think that Fields will make a good editor, beside saving the salary, and F. may think so too. In certain respects he would, as the dining editor for example, to look after authors when they came to Boston and the like. I shall be quite satisfied, anyhow,--though the salary is a convenience, for I have done nothing to advance my own private interest in the matter.”

The break-up of the business of Phillips & Sampson naturally led to the distribution of their copyright books, and Emerson was one of the authors publishing with them, who was now considering the transfer of his books to Ticknor & Fields. “I saw Ticknor yesterday,” Lowell wrote him, 21 October, 1859, “and he says he wants the magazine to go on as it has gone. I never talked so long with him before, and the impression he gave was that of a man very shrewd in business after it is once in train, but very inert of judgment. I rather think Fields is captain when at home.[131] My opinion about your book is this. The book is a sure one at any rate, and if Little & Brown publish it, they will sell copies to all who would buy anything of yours at any rate. They are eminently respectable and trustworthy. Ticknor would have of course the same chance to start on that L. & B. would have, but I should think it natural that he would be able to sell more copies because the _kind_ of book he publishes is rather less of the library-completing sort than those of L. & B., and because (I suppose) he has correspondents who always take a certain number of his books whether or no. In short, it seems to me that his chances in the way of distribution and putting the volume on many counters and under many eyes are the best. With an author like you this is not much, but it is something....

“I have quite a prize in the December number--the story of a real filibuster written by himself.[132] It is well done and will interest you. I wish to get together a few of our chief tritons at a dinner soon to make them acquainted with the new Poseidon. Will you come? At Porter’s or Parker’s, whichever you prefer, and as early as you like so that you may get back to Concord.”

After Mr. Fields returned from Europe the question of the editorship came up anew. The times were lowering, every one who had ventures was taking in sail, Mr. Fields had been the editorial member of the book firm, his relations with authors both at home and abroad were of the most friendly nature, and it was thus most reasonable and natural that he should take charge of the _Atlantic_, and Lowell resigned the editorship in a half-serious, half-whimsical letter which Mr. Norton has printed.[133] It is clear that he had a divided mind. He had become so far wonted to his work that he had less anxiety in performing it, and he had an honest pride in maintaining the high standard which his own taste and judgment had created. He was glad also of the greater ease in money matters which the salary gave; and yet, as his letters show, he welcomed the freedom from the daily exactions of the editorial life, and the return to the more self-determined occupation which he had known most of his days.

Yet in editing the _Atlantic_, Lowell was more or less consciously reënforcing the love of literature which commanded him, and the combined labor of academic study and teaching and the organization of literature undoubtedly enriched his life, and made him more ready for the large enterprises which lay before him.

It was a great reënforcement of contentment that he had returned to his old home at Elmwood. There had been some talk of his taking the house which Professor Felton was to give up on getting a new one, but arrangement was made, finally, to go back to Elmwood, and there the new establishment was set up with Dr. Lowell and Miss Rebecca Lowell as joint occupants. This was a few months before Lowell retired from the editorship of the _Atlantic_, and his content appears in a letter which he was writing to Mr. Richard Grant White, 15 March, 1861: “We are having,” he says, “the finest snowstorm of the winter. And what a delight to me to be here in my old garret at Elmwood, no college to go to (it is Saturday), sheltered by the very wings of the storm, and shut in from all the world by this white cloud of peace let down from heaven! The great chimney stacks roar a deep bass like Harlaem organ pipes. The old lightning rod thumps and rattles with every gust, as I used to hear it so long ago when there were no colleges nor magazines, nor any world outside our belt of pines. I am at _home_ again. I like everything and everybody. Presently I shall draw on my Canada leggings and wade down to the post with this. I shall come back full of snow and northwest wind and appetite. I shall sit down at my own table in the old familiar room where I hope to welcome you one of these days.”[134]

In his L’Envoi, “To the Muse,” which appears to have been written not far from this time, he has some bright reflections on the elusiveness of the spirit of poetry which beckoned him. In point of fact there was very little poetry written by him while he was at once professor and editor. His “Biglow Papers” had been republished in England, with an Introduction by T. Hughes. His old friend, Mr. Gay, was in England at the time and had a hand in the business. The publication naturally drew fresh attention to Lowell’s satiric verse, and he wrote, a trifle piqued: “I confess I am a little jealous of people who like my humorous poems best. I guess they are right ‘up to date,’ but I feel also as if it were a little unfair to t’other half of me, which has not fairly worked itself free so as to combine--here I was interrupted day before yesterday, and I believe I was going to say--so as to combine the results of life with those of study. However, I grow more and more persuaded that what a man is is of greater consequence than what he _does_, especially than what he writes. The secret is, I suppose, to work oneself out clear so that what he is may be one with what he writes.”

END OF VOLUME I

The Riverside Press
_Electrotyped and printed by H. O. Houghton & Co._
_Cambridge, Mass., U. S. A._

FOOTNOTES:

[1] See Appendix A, The Lowell Ancestry.

[2] In 1853 Dr. Lowell contemplated the publication of a volume of sermons, and his then associate, Dr. Bartol, wrote privately to the son, discouraging the venture. He had not the heart openly to oppose Dr. Lowell. “I know,” he writes, “I can trust you to understand me fully when I say it is my persuasion and that of true and strong friends of your father in the parish, that a volume could never overtake his actual reputation, that what is best in him, his voice, his look, his manner, _himself_, cannot be printed, and that his peculiar glory is one that should scarcely be touched with ink.” There did appear, however, in 1855 a volume by Dr. Lowell, entitled _Sermons; chiefly Occasional_.

[3] _Alongside_, by Mrs. Caroline H. Dall. Privately printed.

[4] “My grandmother,” Lowell once said, “was a loyalist to her death, and whenever Independence Day came round, instead of joining in the general rejoicing, she would dress in deep black, fast all day, and loudly lament ‘our late unhappy differences with his most gracious Majesty.’”

[5] In a review of _the Book of British Ballads_ in _The Pioneer_, Lowell says: “And the dear ‘Annie of Lochroyan,’ too, made thrice dear to us by the often hearing it from lips that gave an original beauty of their own to whatever they recited.”

[6] He was named after his father’s maternal grandfather, Judge James Russell, of Charlestown.

[7] Robert Traill Spence Lowell was graduated at Harvard College in 1833. He became an Episcopal clergyman in 1842, went shortly after as a missionary to Newfoundland, had a parish later in New Jersey, then took the headmastership of S. Mark’s School, Southborough, Mass., and finally was called to the chair of Latin language and literature in Union College. He remained in Schenectady till his death, 12 September, 1891, just a month after the death of his younger brother. He had a distinct literary gift, and published several books, which were the outcome of his life in its varied scenes. _The New Priest in Conception Bay_ has vivid pictures of Newfoundland, and contains one character, Elnathan Bangs, who is as racy a Yankee in his own way as Hosea Biglow himself. The book unfortunately was published by Philips & Sampson just as Mr. Phillips died and the firm went into bankruptcy, and lost thus the advantage of a good start. It was revived a good many years later, but never enjoyed the vogue it might have had. Mr. Lowell’s experiences at S. Mark’s lay behind a story for schoolboys, _Antony Brade_, and his life in Schenectady suggested _A Story or Two from an Old Dutch Town._ He published also _Fresh Hearts that Failed Three Thousand Years Ago, and Other Poems_, a book which his brother had the pleasure of reviewing in the _Atlantic_. His best known poem, “The Relief of Lucknow,” appeared also in the _Atlantic_, under his brother’s editorship.

[8] Mary Traill Spence Lowell was born 3 December, 1810, was married to Samuel Raymond Putnam, 25 April, 1832, and died in Boston, 1 June, 1898. She was a woman of intellectual power and literary accomplishment. She chose to write anonymously, but the books she wrote, _Records of an Obscure Man_, _The Tragedy of Errors_, _Fifteen Days_, and _The Tragedy of Success_, though remote from the current of popular taste in her day, not only disclose a most thoughtful nature, and one profoundly interested in great subjects of racial and philosophical moment, but not infrequently are exceedingly felicitous in expression.

[9] In a lecture on Spenser, given in 1856, Lowell said, “_The Faery Queene_ was the first poem I ever read, and I had no suspicion of any double meaning in it.”

[10] “An Epistle to George William Curtis,” 1874.

[11] _Conversations on Some of the Old Poets_, pp. 170, 171.

[12] Said at the commemoration of the one hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the foundation of the West Church, Boston, 1887.

[13] _The Power of Sound: a rhymed lecture_, pp. 22, 23.

[14] “‘Tis near midnight, and I hear a bass-drum, kettle-drum and fife in the distance, playing the dear old _boongalang_ tune of my earliest days, the very one to which General Gage marched out of Boston. It is delightful. I think it is the noise Wagner is always trying to make and failing.”--J. R. L. to C. E. Norton, 16 April, 1889.

[15] “Books and Libraries” in _Literary and Political Addresses, Works_, vi. 83.

[16] _Latest Literary Essays and Addresses_, p. 43.

[17] _Literary and Political Addresses_, pp. 69, 70.

[18] Mr. Shackford did not live to continue his friendship with Lowell. He died in 1842.

[19] The Hasty Pudding Club, a Harvard students’ club, which has always made much of literature of the lighter sort, its specialty now being amateur theatricals.

[20] “Thoreau,” in _Literary Essays_, i. 366.

[21] There is a letter from Mrs. Anna Cabot Lowell, 3 July, 1838, to her brother-in-law, which throws a little light on the way in which his friends regarded Lowell at this time: “Aunt S. was here last evening and depicted in a lively manner the grief of Scates for your idle courses. She says he went to you with tears in his eyes to implore you to persevere, and that he told his friends in faltering accents that you had but this one fault in the world. Being desirous to know the exact nature of that fault, that you might apply the specific remedy, I asked her what the fault was. She said ‘indolence to be sure: indolence and the Spence negligence.’ I quote her very words. My opinion of the case is that it proceeds more from negligence than indolence, and more from a blind confidence in your powers and your destiny than either.”

[22] _Letters_, ii. 302.

[23] It was not uncommon in those days and long after for a student to take his degree at the Law School after a year or two only of study and then to continue to hear lectures. Lowell’s name is on the catalogue of the school for the year following his degree.

[24] William Page, the artist, whom Lowell first knew through the Whites.

[25] “Goethe’s poetic sense was the Minotaur to which he sacrificed everything. To make a study he would soil the maiden petals of a woman’s soul.”--“Lessing,” in _Literary Essays_, ii. 195.

[26] It is very likely under the impetus given by Maria White that Lowell took a place as delegate to the Anti-Slavery Convention held in Boston, 17 November, 1840.

[27] _Letters_, i. 67-69.

[28] _James Russell Lowell and His Friends_, pp. 72-76.

[29] “I have enjoyed the society of my fair cousin Maria very much. She has shown me several of James’s letters, and I think I never saw such perfect specimens of _love-letters_,--those in any novel you ever read are perfectly indifferent compared to them. Without being silly in the least, they are full of all the fervor and extatification which you would expect from the most ardent lover.”--L. L. Thaxter to T. W. Higginson, 19 January, 1842.

[30] “I am obliged to stay at home whenever Father goes to Boston, and as he usually goes thither on the four first days of the week, I am rather closely prisoned.”--J. R. L. to R. Carter, 31 December, 1843.

[31] Thomas W. White, the editor.

[32] The sonnet, “To the Spirit of Keats,” was the first of the two; the other was “Sunset and Moonshine,” not retained by the poet in his final collection.

[33] “[Mrs. Longfellow] was the first stranger that ever said a kind word to me about my poems. She spoke to me of my _Year’s Life_, then just published. I had then just emerged from the darkest and unhappiest period of my life, and was peculiarly sensitive to sympathy. My volume, I knew, was crude and immature, and did not do me justice; but I knew also that there was a _heart_ in it, and I was grateful for her commendation.”--J. R. L. to H. W. Longfellow, 13 August, 1845.

[34] “Especially grateful is the praise of one in whose conversation I have marked a hearty appreciation of those greatest reformers, our glorious old English Poets.”--J. R. L. to Robert Carter, 2 September, 1842.

[35] Mr. Woodberry, in editing “Lowell’s Letters to Poe,” in _Scribner’s Monthly_ for August, 1894, explains the situation thus: “The contract bound Lowell and Carter to furnish the publishers five thousand copies on the twentieth of each month under a penalty of five hundred dollars in case of failure and the publishers to take that number at a certain price. The March number was eight days late, and the publishers, in the face of what was probably seen to be an unfortunate speculation, claimed the forfeit but offered to waive it if the contract should be altered so as to require them to take only so many copies as they could sell. The result was that the editors were obliged to stop printing from a lack of credit, and were left with a large indebtedness for manufacture as well as to contributors. It appears from Poe’s letters that he was paid his small claim a year later.”

[36] Carter had just been to see Maria White.

[37] “The Maiden’s Death.”

[38] In a letter written after he had at last seen Miss White, Mr. Briggs writes: “I hardly know what I could say to M. W. unless what I felt inclined to when I saw her, ‘_Sancta Maria, ora pro nobis_.’”

[39] “L’Envoi,” beginning

“whether my heart hath wiser grown or not.”

[40] _The Broadway Journal_, which Mr. Briggs was just projecting.

[41] Mr. Briggs had written to Lowell: “I suppose that you are going to impose upon yourselves the heathenish ceremonies of a wedding, and in the most solemn period of your lives, give yourselves up to the most foolish of all the world’s follies. Tut! you will be sick of white satins and raisins for the next century. Is’t the first of the month that you are to be married? I would like to know the day that I may keep you in remembrance. Page will be here and I will have him down to Bishop’s Terrace, and we will keep it up with becoming solemnity. One of my darling fowls shall be sacrificed.”

[42] The exact succession of his books was _A Year’s Life_, 1841; _Poems_, 1843 (dated 1844); _Conversations on Some of the Old Poets_, 1845.

[43] Mr. Evert A. Duyckinck, in March, 1846, replying to a suggestion by Lowell of “specimens of old translators” for Wiley & Putnam’s Library, doubts the practicability, but adds, “You will, I hope, not lose sight of so good a topic which might provoke a new conversation between yourself and your Mrs. Harris (Philip and John) very profitably.”

[44] _Letters_, i. 69.

[45] See Appendix B.

[46] Editor of _Graham’s Magazine_.

[47] _Nathaniel Hawthorne and his Wife_, i. 283.

[48] The circumstances pertaining to the close of Mr. Briggs’s connection with _The Broadway Journal_ are detailed with some particularity in letters from Mr. Briggs to Lowell, printed in Mr. G. E. Woodberry’s _Edgar Allan Poe_ in the _American Men of Letters_ series. See pp. 234-239.

[49] Lowell’s letters to Poe may be found in an article with that title, edited by Mr. Woodberry, and printed in _Scribner’s Magazine_, August, 1894. Those of Poe to Lowell appear in Mr. Woodberry’s volume on Poe in the _American Men of Letters_ series. Lowell’s letters, which run from 19 November, 1842, when he was beginning his _Pioneer_ venture, to 12 December, 1844, just before his marriage, are occupied mainly with solicitation of contributions, interest in Poe’s work, and efforts at obtaining opportunities for Poe to lecture in Boston. They have slight value as illustrations of Lowell’s life, save as they show his eagerness to help a brother author, and his keen interest in letters.

[50] It may be noted that at the New England Anti-Slavery Convention held in Boston, 28 May, 1844, the issue of disunion was plainly presented in a set of resolutions. The vote stood 250 in favor to 24 in dissent. Among the number who voted “nay” were James Russell Lowell and Maria White. See _William Lloyd Garrison_, iii. 111, 112.

[51] For a striking use of the poem, see _infra_, vol. ii. p. 137.

[52] But his talk went on as unrestrictedly as ever. Longfellow records in his diary under date of 23 October, 1845: “Lowell passed the morning with me. Amiable enthusiast! He proposes to write a book in favor of fanaticism.”

[53] It is a comment on Lowell’s indifference to wealth that his imagination did not take fire at the announcement of the discovery of gold in California. It may be said that his mind was directed toward the immediate political consequences, but he had occasion to write upon the subject of the discovery, when this alone engaged his attention. He was struck with some of the picturesque situations, but his reflections were mainly summed up in these words: “We have never seen anything like the accounts from California since we read that chapter of _Candide_, in which Voltaire carries his hero to El Dorado. Supposing all we hear to be true, it is hardly probable that gold will continue to be found there in such large quantities for any great length of time. It will doubtless become more and more scarce, and the difficulty of obtaining it greater. After all, the gold mines which give the surest and richest yield are the brain and the common earth. The discovery of a new fertilizer is of more practical benefit than that of the philosopher’s stone would be; the invention of the steam-engine has created more wealth than the richest gold mines; and wise men are not wanting who believe that Fourier has given us something better than a California. And why travel fifteen thousand miles around Cape Horn for a place to dig in? Heaven knows the earth wants more washing here than at Sacramento River. Moreover, every one of us has a vein more or less profitable, if it were only diligently worked.”--“Eldorado,” in _National Anti-Slavery Standard_, 21 December, 1848.

[54] Mr. Briggs was highly entertained by the French exercise, and asked: “Who is your master? But never mind. Let me recommend you to an incomparable one who had the honor of teaching Talleyrand a new language (English) to help him conceal his thoughts. I mean Cobbett. If you have never seen his French grammar, get it by all means and read it, if you do not study it; and then read his English grammar, which you will find more amusing than the Comic Latin Grammar.” Lowell does not seem to have followed his advice immediately. At least he wrote to me three or four years before his death: “I never read any English grammar in my life, thank God, except Cobbett’s a few years ago, and in that I found errors of ignorance,--as was to be expected.”

[55] At the close of 1866 a testimonial was presented to Mr. Garrison when he retired from active service, and Lowell was the medium of certain English subscriptions, among them that of John Bright. In sending this Lowell writes to Mr. Garrison: “Nothing could have been more in keeping with the uniform wisdom of your anti-slavery leadership than the time you chose for resigning it.”

[56] It is greatly to be regretted that the important correspondence of Quincy and Lowell does not exist. By agreement each destroyed the letters of the other.

[57] The curious reader may see here one of the little idiosyncrasies in which Lowell indulged throughout his life, though this is one of the first instances I have noted.

[58] Mr. Gay had written: “I do not know how you feel about the Imprint, but my own opinion is that there had better be either no name, or only one there. Every one will know that yourself, Mrs. Chapman and Quincy and Briggs and others contribute to its columns. The more we can make believe contribute to it the better, and to put three or four names in the Imprint will seem to limit the number. I wish that all its readers shall believe that a variety of people have had a hand in the making up of every number, and not only those whose names are before them. For the same reason I wish that the initial system shall be done with. The readers will be prone to believe the best if they are not certain, and if there are none of these ‘small caps,’ as the printers say, to guide, they may sometimes be humbugged into eating my chaff for your and others’ wheat.” Mr. Gay had his way at first, but before long his readers’ curiosity drove him into the use of initials as signatures.

[59] See _Letters of James Russell Lowell_, i. 111-116. Copyright, 1893, by Harper & Brothers.

[60] A little of this jest is preserved in Parson Wilbur’s note to the second _Biglow paper_, as published in book form.

[61] In his address on “The Place of the Independent in Politics,” delivered forty years later, Lowell pithily says: “A moral purpose multiplies us (Independents) by ten, as it multiplied the early Abolitionists. They emancipated the negro; and we mean to emancipate the respectable white man.”

[62] There is a reference to Jefferson in a letter written ten years later, which is interesting as one of the rare apprizements by Lowell of American public men. “I have run through Randall’s _Jefferson_ with the ends of my fingers--a perfect chaos of biography--but enough to confirm me in the belief that Jefferson was the first _American_ man. I doubt if we have produced a better thinker or writer. His style is admirable in general, warmed with just enough enthusiasm for eloquence, not too much for conviction.”--J. R. L. to C. E. Norton, 11 October, 1858.

[63] “A steam-engine in breeches,” was Sydney Smith’s characterization.

[64] _Letters_, i. 157, 21 May, 1849.

[65] Dr. Lowell’s course in this matter was characteristic of his fine sense of honor. Previous to the ordination of his colleague, Dr. Bartol, 1 March, 1837, he received from the West Church Society a salary of $2000 a year. At a meeting of the proprietors held 22 April, 1849, a letter was read from Dr. Lowell, in which he says: “It was always a favorite object with me, in the event of the settlement of a colleague pastor, to resign the whole of my salary, or at most, to retain only a small portion of it, that you might have less hesitation in calling upon me for the services I might be able to render you.” It was with great reluctance, he added, that he then came to the conclusion it was his duty to accede to the request of the proprietors and retain all the salary he had been accustomed to receive; now he could do so no longer, and he insisted respectfully on an arrangement by which he should resign a quarter of his salary, “with the purpose at no distant day, if Providence permit, of resigning a further sum.” In 1854 Dr. Lowell resigned the whole of his salary, but the Society declined to accept the proposal.

[66] “I do not blame Foster or Philbrick or Jackson for not being satisfied with me; but, on the other hand, I thank God that he has gradually taught me to be quite satisfied with _them_.”--_Letters_, i. 157.

[67] Cornelius Matthews.

[68] The greater part of this letter will be found in _Letters of James Russell Lowell_, i. 120. Copyright by Harper & Brothers, 1893.

[69] The reference apparently is to Miss Fuller’s criticism of Lowell three years previously, in which she said: “His interest in the moral questions of the day has supplied the want of vitality in himself; his great facility at versification has enabled him to fill the ear with a copious stream of pleasant sound. But his verse is stereotyped: his thoughts sound no depth, and posterity will not remember him.”--_Papers on Literature and Art_, p. 308.

[70] Briggs did not like Bryant, and in this he was abetted by Page, to whom Bryant at this time was sitting. Page was angry because, in the brief notice of Lowell’s _Poems_ which Bryant wrote, he commended only the “Morning Glory,” which was Mrs. Lowell’s, and because Bryant intimated that Lowell’s “To the Past” was suggested by a poem of his own with the same title.

[71] This was the year of General Taylor’s nomination.

[72] In a letter to me about the _Fable_ written in 1890, Lowell says: “Mr. Putnam, I believe, never discovered that the title-page was in metre, nor that it was in rhyme either. Mr. Norton told me the other day that he had a copy of some later edition (after Putnam had changed his place of business), in which the imprint was ‘G. P. Putnam, Astor (or something) Place.’ I don’t remember whether I knew of it at the time, but had I known, I should have let it pass as adding to the humor of the book.” The first title-page ended

SET FORTH IN
_October, the 31st day, in the year ’48_
G. P. PUTNAM, BROADWAY.

[73] Hunt’s poem again doubtless owed its being to Lord Byron’s _English Bards and Scotch Reviewers_.

[74] Morse’s _Life and Letters of Oliver Wendell Holmes_, ii. 107. In an unfinished letter to Dr. Holmes written from Madrid in 1878, Lowell refers to a recent criticism of Holmes’s poems, in which the characterization in the _Fable_ was quoted. “I thought the young fellow who wrote it had some sense, especially as he quoted something I said of you in my impudence thirty years ago. It is an awful thought, but these who then were passing out of the baldness of infancy are now entering upon that of middle age, and here we both are as if nothing had happened. And probably precious little has happened,--I mean of any great account. The more one reads of history the more one sees mankind doing the same foolish things over again with admirable gravity and then contemplating themselves with the satisfaction of Jack Horner. I remember when I was writing the _Fable for Critics_ and used to walk up and down the front walk at Elmwood, I paused to watch the ant-hills, and in the seemingly aimless and yet ceaseless activity of their citizens thought I saw a very close paraphrase of the life of men.”

[75] The Bibliographical Note in the Appendix gives the dates of the successive numbers. See Appendix C.

[76] When he was supervising the final _Riverside_ edition of his writings, he gladly accepted the services of a graduate student at Harvard, now Professor of Law in Western Reserve University, Mr. Frank Beverly Williams, who prepared a series of notes.

[77] Mr. Otis died October 28. “Only think of H. G. O!” wrote Lowell to Gay early in November; “I would not have squibbed him if I had known he was sick, but I never hear anything.”

[78] Writing forty years later in excuse of a petty solecism, he said: “I think it must have been written when I was fresh from the last _Biglow Papers_. When my soul enters Mr. Biglow’s person, she divests herself for the time of all conventional speech, and for some time after she leaves it is apt to forget herself.”

[79] He had the ill luck which not infrequently attends the writers of fiction, to make use of an actual name in one of his inventions, and received this protest from the Rev. H. Wilbur:--

“Unknown Sir, I believe there is no other clergyman in New England besides myself of the same name you sometimes associate with your writings. Perhaps with the scintillations of your genius my name would be more likely to descend to posterity than from writings or labours of my own. But if your edification could be as well promoted under the ministry of Parson Smith or some _fictitious_ name not likely to be associated with individuality as with the _old Parson_ you will much oblige yours very respectfully.”

[80] He intended first to call this “A June Idyll.”

[81] That is, the hostile criticisms of his book.

[82] These letters from Hawthorne were first printed in the London _Athenæum_, 10, 17 August, 1889, and have since been included in vol. xvii. of the _Old Manse Edition_ of Hawthorne’s writings.

[83] An article on Landor.

[84] In a note to T. W. Higginson, who proposed an article in the _Atlantic_ on Parker, Lowell wrote 28 June, 1860: “I think that folks have confounded (as they commonly do) _force_ with _power_ in estimating him, and so have overrated him.”

[85] _The Liberty Bell._

[86] _The Homes of the New World: Impressions of America._ By Fredrika Bremer. New York: Harper & Bros. 1853. Vol. i. pp. 130, 131.

[87] See _Boston Courier_, 3 January, 1850.

[88] “The Darkened Mind.”

[89] Whether or no this started Mr. Gay on an historical investigation, he did inquire into the matter; for thirty years later he published in the _Atlantic_ for November, 1881, an article entitled, “When did the Pilgrim Fathers land at Plymouth?” in which he established to his own satisfaction that the first landing was neither on the 21st or 22d, but on the 4th of January, 1621.

[90] In another letter written on shipboard, Lowell refers to the gift thus: “I held it in especial esteem because it was given in a way so characteristic of John, who sidled up to me as if he were asking a favor instead of doing one, and having slipped it into my hand in a particularly let-not-your-right-hand-know-what-your-left-hand-doeth kind of manner, instantly vanished and remained absconded for half an hour.”

[91] _Leaves from my Journal, Works_, i. 213.

[92] It was more than thirty years later that Lowell wrote the significant poem suggested by this picture.

[93] Mr. Black’s daughter, Mrs. Hayllar, kindly sends the two prologues, which are in a way wholly from memory. Lowell afterwards, she writes, “tore up his notes, saying the lines were too insignificant for preservation, when to his astonishment, my father, who had a quite remarkable memory, repeated them both to him.” From her own memory Mrs. Hayllar recalled the bits of the first prologue, and afterward found amongst her father’s papers the whole of the second.

[94] See “Walter Savage Landor,” in _Latest Literary Essays and Addresses_, p. 51.

[95] _The Poems and Prose Remains of Arthur Hugh Clough_, i. 188.

[96] Perhaps his partial friend Briggs was referring to this when he wrote, 18 March, 1860: “If you bring out that long promised volume of fireside travels, I hope you will not omit that racy chapter of the novel you read to me, but which you will never write. I think it was much better than anything of the Autocrat’s that I have read.”

[97] The lines on pp. 80, 81, of “Cambridge Thirty Years Ago” are also saved from the same poem, but from the unprinted portion.

[98] See his two letters to T. W. Higginson, outlining his plan, and published by the latter in his _Old Cambridge_.

[99] See letter to Mr. Norton, 13 April, 1884, _Letters_, ii. 279.

[100] “A Few of Lowell’s Letters” in _The Old Rome and the New and other Studies_, p. 134.

[101] The poem was not printed till April, 1858, when it appeared in _The Atlantic Monthly_.

[102] It was the custom when there was an unusual demand for tickets, for the lecturer, besides his Tuesday and Friday evening discourses, to repeat them on Wednesday and Saturday afternoons. In those days also, applicants for tickets registered their names during a certain number of days in advance, and at the close of the registry notification was made that persons holding numbers divisible by two, three, four, or five, as the case might be (in the ratio of applicants to the number of seats in the hall), might call and receive tickets.

[103] Probably the verses beginning,--

“Farewell, for the bark has her breast to the tide.”

[104] “A Good Word for Winter,” in _Literary Essays_, iii. 267.

[105] “Mr. Lowell as a Teacher:” _Scribner’s Magazine_, November, 1891. Included in his volume _Stelligeri_: Charles Scribner’s Sons.

[106] “Address before the Modern Language Association of America.”

[107] 21 August, 1857.

[108] 31 August, 1857.

[109] 31 December, 1857.

[110] “A Few of Lowell’s Letters,” in _The Old Rome and the New, and Other Studies_, by W. J. Stillman.

[111] _Literary Friends and Acquaintance_, p. 242.

[112] See especially “The Subjective of It,” first printed in the _Atlantic Monthly_, and “The Philosophers’ Camp,” printed in _The Century_, and both included in _The Old Rome and the New, and Other Studies_. And more particularly see the first volume of _The Autobiography of a Journalist_.

[113] It is worth noting that the year in which this sentence was written, the _Atlantic Monthly_ was, in a special contingency, edited by the Professor of English Literature at Princeton.

[114] Mr. Phillips was by marriage connected with Mr. Emerson’s family.

[115] Mr. J. Elliot Cabot.

[116] E. E. Hale’s _James Russell Lowell and his Friends_.

[117] “The New Portfolio,” January, 1885.

[118] In publishing in book form _The Mortal Antipathy_, of which the first paper of “The New Portfolio” was made the Introduction, Dr. Holmes so far corrected his statement as to make it read: “I wondered somewhat when Mr. Lowell insisted upon my becoming a contributor.”

[119] “He envied every daysman and drover in the tavern their manly speech.” In reprinting the paper in his volume _Society and Solitude_, Emerson corrected to “He envied every drover and lumberman.”

[120] Most of this letter is given in Mr. Pickard’s _Life and Letters of John Greenleaf Whittier_.

[121] “The Origin of Didactic Poetry.”

[122] I recall the sententious principle which another editor announced to me as the rule by which he was governed. “The only question I ask myself is, _must_ I take this?”

[123] _Letters_, i. 288, 289.

[124] There are three or four witty passages, to which this is applicable.

[125] See _Letters_, i. 283, 284.

[126] The Wanderer was a slave-ship seized in New York harbor. A Charleston jury refused to convict the captain.

[127] _Letters_, i. 286.

[128] _Letters_, i. 281.

[129] He was elected into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 14 November, 1855, and into the Massachusetts Historical Society, 14 May, 1863, but he does not appear to have been a frequent attendant at the meetings of either of these bodies.

[130] This criticism also is given in C. E. Stowe’s _The Life of Harriet Beecher Stowe_.

[131] Mr. Fields was in Europe when the transaction occurred.

[132] “Experience of Samuel Absalom, Filibuster,” by D. Deaderick.

[133] _Letters_, i. 310. May 23, 1861.

[134] The household at Elmwood was broken in upon apparently not long after the return of the Lowells, by the death of Dr. Charles Lowell, 20 January, 1861.