Chapter XI: Poetry and Prose (1)

1858-1872

Lowell’s writing during the war, and very largely also during the four previous years in which he had been engaged on the _Atlantic_, was mainly of a political character, and it has seemed best not to interrupt the record with much reference to his other writings and his pursuits generally during these eight years. But though he felt keenly the great movement which was breaking up the old union and making way for the new and greater union, he was too established in his own order of life to permit that to undergo any violent change. Even in his political writing, as we have seen, he was first of all a man of letters, with an imaginative foresight; his occupation both as a teacher and an editor gave a certain steadying force to his powers, so that though he rebelled against the irksomeness of routine he was delivered from what might have been the waywardness of a too self-centred life.

His safety-valve during all this period was in his letters to his familiar friends, as it was also in the free talk which he held with them; and this, even though he chafed under restraint and pressure which seemed to him to lessen his spontaneity. “How malicious you are,” he writes to Miss Norton, 23 October, 1858, “about what I said of women’s being good letter writers! What I meant was that they wrote more unconsciously than we do. I don’t know how it is with other folks, but I cannot sit down now and write a letter as if I were talking. Good writing, I take it, can only result from necessity of expression, and an author satisfies that in so many ways that his letters are apt to be dull.

“I like ‘Miles Standish’ better than you do. I think it in some respects the best long poem L. has written. It is so simple and picturesque, and the story is not encumbered with unavailing description, which is a fault in ‘Evangeline.’ But I quite agree with you about the metre. It is too deceitfully easy.

“One might begin at dawn nor end till the purple twilight,
Stringing verses at will, nor know it was verse he was stringing.
This is the modern way, the way of steamer and railroad
Where all the work is done, you scarcely know how, by the Engine.
Ah, but the Hill of Fame, can they dig it down? can they grade it?
Difficult always is Good, and he, I guess, who attains it
Starts with two feet and a staff and bread for To-day in his wallet,
Footsore dropping at last, repaid by long hope of the summit.”

His college duties he performed with conscientious fidelity, and he found at times a genuine satisfaction in the free intercourse with his students over great subjects, yet he could not always overlook the immaturity of his pupils, and he was impatient at the sort of work outside of direct teaching which falls to the lot of college professors. The task of lecturing itself was sure to suggest the incompleteness of expression, and so offend all his genius as a writer. “Yesterday,” he writes to Miss Norton, in the fall of 1859, “I began my lectures. I came off better than I expected, for I am always a great coward beforehand. I _hate_ lecturing, for I have discovered (entre nous) that it is almost impossible to learn _all_ about anything, unless, indeed, it be some piece of ill-luck, and then one has the help of one’s friends, you know.... I am trying to reform the Spanish and Italian classes. Charles would be astonished to hear me read the Castilian tongue, now wellnigh as familiar to me as Castilian soap. If he wouldn’t be, _I am_. I am about as much ‘Spanish,’ tell him, ‘as a Connecticut segar.’”

At the same time he wrote to Mr. Norton: “I am busier than ever, and, I fear, fruitlessly. My Italian class are half of them drones, and this hinders my getting on as I would with the rest. I am studying Spanish, as I did German in Dresden, reading it in all my leisure time, and before long mean to make myself thorough in it. At forty a man learns fast. My Spanish class is a very good one. There are only five, and they all do their best. _Vacare musis_--what does that mean? I have almost forgotten.”

“I champ the bit sometimes here,” he writes to the same a year later, “but God’s will be done! _Ancora imparo_, though I be in a go-cart. My Spanish recitations cost me some time and trouble as yet, for I make the students parse and construe with never-failing strictness. For this I have to study the grammar harder than any of them, for my Italian is always in my way with its slightly differing forms. However, I have learned more already than I should have thought possible a year ago, and I think some of the students seem to be interested.”

Now and then he could make his college work and his _Atlantic_ work play into each other, but not often. “I have as yet only dipped into your last four volumes,” he writes 12 June, 1860, to R. G. White, “and those I keep for the same good time (i.e. vacation). I have to prepare some lectures on Shakespeare, and shall kill two birds with one stone by making use of your edition, and so enabling myself to write an intelligent notice of it for the _Atlantic_.”

The _Atlantic_ itself gave him an agreeable change from his class-room duties, even if it took him along somewhat the same road as when, shortly after he undertook it, he received a contribution from Sainte-Beuve on Béranger, and translated it for the number for February, 1858. Two months later he began that series of criticisms on the successive volumes of Smith’s “Library of Old English Authors,” which he completed in the _North American_ ten years afterward, and combined into the long paper printed in the first volume of his “Literary Essays.” As an instance of minute detective work in criticism, the article is noteworthy, but we suspect that his readers to-day pass lightly over the scoring of Hazlitt’s editorship to read the brilliant characterizations of Elizabethan poets and dramatists, which crop out of the stony soil of textual criticism. In writing these articles Lowell was recurring to subjects which had, as we have seen, unfailing interest for him, and one cannot compare these notes on Chapman, Webster, Marlowe, and others with the observations that occur in “Conversations with the Old Dramatists,” without marking the greater mellowness of nature from which the later criticism proceeds. Lowell writes of them, not as in the first instance when he was just returned from a voyage of discovery, but as one who has lived long and familiarly in this rich country of the poetic mind.[19]

Excepting the “Biglow Papers,” a couple of political articles, two or three poems, and a few brief reviews of books, Lowell did not contribute to the _Atlantic_ during the four years of the war, and naturally he turned his prose work into the _North American_ after he became one of its editors. There, as we have seen, his work was mainly political, though he also did much reviewing of books; but after the pressure of war-time was lifted he made the review the vehicle for more strictly literary articles, and it was plainly a relief to him to spring back to subjects more congenial to his nature. In January, 1865, when Mr. Norton supplied the main political paper, Lowell printed that most characteristic article which in his collected writings bears the title “New England Two Centuries Ago,” and is in outward form a review of the third volume of Palfrey’s “History of New England” and of four volumes of the collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society. In its larger part a skilful florilegium of early writings, the paper is also and emphatically the reflection of Lowell’s mind during the stress of the war, when he was doubly concerned over the relation between the two great English-speaking nations and the practical solutions of the problems presented to democracy in the reëstablishment of order and union in the United States. He had rising in him, as his Ode shows, a great passion for the whole country; but as has been well said by Colonel Higginson, that no one can be a true cosmopolitan who is not at home in his own country, so it is equally true that national consciousness has its basis in local pride and affection. The genius of our political organism, by which one is called on for a double loyalty to state and nation, a loyalty jeoparded by the heresy of an extreme state-rights dogma, was finely disclosed in Lowell’s attitude. Fortunately for us the locality, the community in which our fortune is cast, has in itself a political essence, so that it is not mere attachment to the place of birth and breeding which makes its natural demand on us, but membership in an organism lacking only the crown of absolute independence to make it a unit of politics. It is a subtle but very real distinction between state and nation that permits not a divided but a complex loyalty, and the profound meaning which lies in the interplay of state and federal power is reflected in the consciousness of Americans as they bear themselves toward one or the other authority.

Now New England, though not an entity in politics, has so distinct a character that each of the states included in that name is representative of an order which is far more than a geographical division. Largely by reason of its historic genesis and development, New England is more an individual than any other group of commonwealths unless it be the Cotton States, and a man of Massachusetts, clearly the heart of the whole system, is very sure to think of himself as a New Englander without prejudice to his loyalty to his own state. Lowell certainly did. It was through New England, its history, its spirit, its genius, that he apprehended the very nature of freedom and the principles of democracy. Mr. Henry James has well said: “New England was heroic to him, for he felt in his pulses the whole history of her _origines_; it was impossible to know him without a sense that he had a rare divination of the hard realities of her past.”[20] And this article on “New England Two Centuries Ago,” designed to offer something of a conspectus of a people and land from which he was sprung, whose life was coursing in his veins, was also an interpretation of the political faith he held, a faith which he postulated for the final manifestation of the whole nation that in his imagination he saw rising out of the confusion of struggle. “I have little sympathy,” he says at the close, “with declaimers about the Pilgrim Fathers, who look upon them all as men of grand conceptions and superhuman foresight. An entire ship’s company of Columbuses is what the world never saw. It is not wise to form any theory and fit our facts to it, as a man in a hurry is apt to cram his travelling-bag, with a total disregard of shape or texture. But perhaps it may be found that the facts will only fit comfortably together on a single plan, namely, that the fathers did have a conception (which those will call grand who regard simplicity as a necessary element of grandeur) of founding here a commonwealth on those two eternal bases of Faith and Work; that they had indeed no revolutionary ideas of universal liberty, but yet, what answered the purpose quite as well, an abiding faith in the brotherhood of man and the fatherhood of God; and that they did not so much propose to make all things new, as to develop the latent possibilities of English law and English character, by clearing away the fences by which the abuse of the one was gradually discommoning the other from the broad fields of universal right. They were not in advance of their age, as it is called, for no one who is so can ever work profitably in it; but they were alive to the highest and most earnest thinking of their time.”

In this article, also, one may see something of Lowell’s feeling about England, which again was almost a traditionary sentiment. He saw the mother country through the glass of New England, and especially valued that Puritan strain in English history which had found such free play in New England. “Puritanism,” he says, “believing itself quick with the seed of religious liberty, laid, without knowing it, the egg of democracy;” and he found in the governmental attitude of England toward America in his own day a reminder of the policy exercised after the Restoration toward New England.

Lowell’s letters make it clear that at this time he was not given to the enjoyment of much hospitality. Mrs. Lowell was frequently an invalid, and though he had familiar friends to stay with him, as Rowse the painter, and gave cordial invitations to such as might be passing through Cambridge, he neither entertained much himself nor accepted entertainment at other houses. Now and then some man of letters came over from England or France and Lowell was asked to meet him. He records such an experience in a letter dated 20 September, 1861:--

“I dined the other day with Anthony Trollope, a big, red-faced, rather underbred Englishman of the bald-with-spectacles type. A good roaring positive fellow who deafened me (sitting on his right) till I thought of Dante’s Cerberus. He says he goes to work on a novel ‘just like a shoemaker on a shoe, only taking care to make honest stitches.’ Gets up at 5 every day, does all his writing before breakfast, and always writes just so many pages a day. He and Dr. Holmes were very entertaining. The Autocrat started one or two hobbies, and charged, paradox in rest--but it was pelting a rhinoceros with seed-pearl.

“_Dr._ You don’t know what Madeira is in England?

“_T._ I’m not so sure it’s worth knowing.

“_Dr._ Connoisseurship in it with us is a fine art. There are men who will tell you a dozen kinds, as Dr. Waagen would know a Carlo Dolci from a Guido.

“_T._ They might be better employed!

“_Dr._ Whatever is worth doing is worth doing well.

“_T._ Ay, but that’s begging the whole question. I don’t admit it’s _worse_ doing at all. If they earn their bread by it, it may be _worse_ doing (roaring).

“_Dr._ But you may be assured--

“_T._ No, but I mayn’t be asshŏrred. I _won’t_ be asshored. I don’t intend to be asshŏred (roaring louder)!

“And so they went it. It was very funny. Trollope wouldn’t give him any chance. Meanwhile, Emerson and I, who sat between them, crouched down out of range and had some very good talk, with the shot hurtling overhead. I had one little passage at arms with T. _apropos_ of English peaches. T. ended by roaring that England was the only country where such a thing as a peach or a grape was known. I appealed to Hawthorne, who sat opposite. His face mantled and trembled for a moment with some droll fancy, as one sees bubbles rise and send off rings in still water when a turtle stirs at the bottom, and then he said, ‘I asked an Englishman once who was praising their peaches to describe to me exactly what he meant by a peach, and he described something very like a cucumber.’ I rather liked Trollope.”

Lowell found in the winter of 1865-1866 a most congenial occasion for society in the meetings in Mr. Longfellow’s study, held for scrutiny of the proofs of that poet’s translation of the “Divina Commedia.” Mr. Longfellow records in his Diary, 25 October, 1865: “Lowell, Norton, and myself had the first meeting of our Dante Club. We read the XXV. _Purgatorio_; and then had a little supper. We are to meet every Wednesday evening at my house.” In the first Report of the Dante Society, Mr. Norton gives a full and interesting account of these meetings, and of the task they set themselves.

“We paused,” he says, “over every doubtful passage, discussed the various readings, considered the true meaning of obscure words and phrases, sought for the most exact equivalent of Dante’s expression, objected, criticised, praised, with a freedom that was made perfect by Mr. Longfellow’s absolute sweetness, simplicity, and modesty, and by the entire confidence that existed between us. Witte’s text was always before us, and of the early commentators Buti was the one to whom we had most frequent and most serviceable recourse. They were delightful evenings; there could be no pleasanter occupation; the spirits of poetry, of learning, of friendship, were with us. Now and then some other friend or acquaintance would join us for the hours of study. Almost always one or two guests would come in at ten o’clock, when the work ended, and sit down with us to a supper, with which the evening closed.”

With the _North American Review_ still making its quarterly demands upon him, but the political impulse less urgent, Lowell turned naturally to literary criticism. Thus far, he had not made any deliberate appraisal of great writers, save in his short paper on Keats, which, from the occasion that called it out, was rather biographical than critical. He had in a fragmentary fashion in his “Conversations,” and in a discursive manner in his lectures, given appreciations of the great poets and dramatists of England, but in the next decade he was to print a series of essays which should embody his reading, study, reflection, and poetic insight in that field of human endeavor where his own work stands, and which had been since his boyish days the one great subject of his investigation.

History, which he read with avidity, was the background from which were projected the great figures of literature. Philosophy was not for him a system of independent reasoning, but rather the unclassified winged thoughts on high themes embodied in great poetic and dramatic art. Language, always a subject full of interest for him, was attacked, not from the point of view of a man of science, but from that of one curious of its human relations and its instrumentality in art. Nor was his knowledge of the plastic arts more than that which comes incidentally to a traveller and a general reader and observer, or his interest in them especially keen. He was very likely to bring the canons of literary art to bear upon them, sometimes indeed, as might be guessed, with shrewdness and analogical truthfulness; or he was affected by personal considerations, as when he writes of Story: “I saw the photographs of William’s statues, and think them _very_ fine. They are really noble. The Quincy is admirable--the best thing of the kind our modern times has produced. In short, to my thinking, William is the only man of them all who knows how to do the thing. It was a real pleasure to be so thoroughly satisfied with the work of an old friend.” He recognized frankly his own limitations in the matter, as indeed he was disposed to think the defect almost ineradicable in the Saxon, who “has never shown any capacity for art, nay, commonly commits ugly blunders when he is tempted in that direction;” and apparently his only suggestion for bettering the condition was to put before workmen good illustrations of great art in the books they should find in their libraries, and give them an acquaintance with Ruskin’s writings.

But literature stood to him as the great exponent of all that was permanent in the human spirit. “There is much,” he says, “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.”[21] It was with this principle determining his choice that he proceeded with more or less conscious assembling to discourse on Carlyle, Emerson, Lessing, Rousseau, Shakespeare, Dryden, Chaucer, Pope, Milton, Dante, Spenser, and Wordsworth, as well as to write in many detached passages on the genius of Goethe. Later he returned to the same general field, and besides revising his judgment on some of these topics, treated also with more or less fulness of Gray, Cervantes, Fielding, and Coleridge, while any one who consults the elaborate index to his prose writings will readily see how many other authors who belong in the great ranks have been drawn upon for illustration of the one great theme.

To his reading of all this literature he brought the touchstone of his own life and experience. In this word “experience,” moreover, must be included his own highest experiments. His poetry, for the most part, as we have already seen, does not have its roots in other literature; it springs from that life which he held in common with those whom he reverenced for their own acts of literary creation. He quotes the recommendation of a friend that he should read poetry, feed himself on bee bread so that he might get into the mood of writing poetry; but, though all his life long Lowell fed, as by the most natural appetite, on poetry and other forms of imaginative literature, his own poetry is not bookish, nor does it borrow in form or phrase. Even when most impressionable in his youth, the influence upon him of Keats and Tennyson was more obvious than that of Shakespeare or Marlowe, only because, eschewing the imitative, his verse took the color of his generation. The likenesses were always general, and when he essayed forms of verse most rigid in their historical development, as the sonnet and the ode, he simply obeyed the law as his great progenitors had done, finding his freedom within the law, and not in outbreaks and protests. The conscious intention to be original, he himself says, seldom leads to anything better than extravagance; and there is a passage in his paper on Chaucer which sums up a large part of his literary philosophy.[22]

“Poets have forgotten that the first lesson of literature, no less than of life, is the learning how to burn your own smoke; that the way to be original is to be healthy; that the fresh color, so delightful in all good writing, is won by escaping from the fixed air of self into the brisk atmosphere of universal sentiments; and that to make the common marvellous, as if it were a revelation, is the test of genius.”

With his large literary essays as works of art I do not purpose concerning myself; such study lies somewhat outside the range of a biography, but as these papers formed a considerable and very important expression of his mind at one period of his life, it is worth while to look at them with a view to discover how far they serve to disclose him, to read them by the light of his experience, and to see if he put his personality into this form of writing. The publication of Carlyle’s “Frederick the Great” was the occasion of the first of these articles. In writing of it to Leslie Stephen, when it was reprinted in “My Study Windows,” he admits that he was harder on Carlyle than he meant to be, because he was fighting against a secret partiality. The phrase lets one a little into Lowell’s mind. As far back as in his college days he was reading Carlyle with gusto, and the breezy description[23] which he gave of Boston at the period when Carlyle’s “message” acted as a sort of leaven in the new dough of New England, was a lively reminiscence of his own tumultuous youth. Thus, upon writing of Carlyle when he himself was nearing the line of fifty, there was an undercurrent of reminiscence of his own callowness. He remembered his devotion to the Carlyle of the “Miscellanies,” and was more or less conscious that he had outlived his first enthusiasm. With all his admiration for the great critic who stirred him when he was himself pricking on the plain of Reform, his point of view was now changed, for he had left Carlyle’s side and come into more complete possession of his own judgment. The secret influences which forbade him to be preponderatingly ethical, which kept him from abandoning himself to the anti-slavery cause, even when he was fighting in the ranks, and made it impossible for him to be a great teacher, though quite aware of what constitutes a great teacher, had lessened, perhaps, his effectiveness in some single direction, but had given him greater poise and enabled him on rare occasions to bring all his powers into play, and then to do easily, without conscious effort, the thing he wanted to do. The “Commemoration Ode” is an instance, and in this judgment of Carlyle he seems to me unwittingly to be judging the Lowell who seemed somewhat possible in the days when he first read Carlyle. There is a sentence in the essay which puts the thing in a nutshell. “The delicate skeleton of admirably articulated and related parts which underlies and sustains every true work of art, and keeps it from sinking on itself a shapeless heap, he [Carlyle] would crush remorselessly to come at the marrow of meaning. With him the ideal sense is secondary to the ethical and metaphysical, and he has but a faint conception of their possible unity.”

It was in the growing conception of this unity that Lowell had moved away from Carlyle. The constant adjustment of the ideal and the ethical had been the ripening process in his mind, a process greatly stimulated by the urgent need he felt during the past few years for finding some common ground on which his visions of truth and freedom and his practical sense could meet. It was largely through a great political realization that Lowell came to be what thenceforth he was, a sane critic of literature and a poet whose imagination instinctively sought large moulds. This is not to say that he was indifferent to any other expression; his nature was too free and spontaneous for that; but if one is to be measured by the main incidents of his life, it is fair to say that the Lowell who after this left his impress on his countrymen was a man of such balance of mind that his judgments and his poems alike had the weight that comes from this equipoise, and the man thus characterized could scarcely fail in new relations to show the ease of one self-centred, and not the restlessness and anxiety of an experimenter with life.

It is this consciousness of art governed by great laws, whether applied to life or to literature, that dominates Lowell’s expression, and in the essay on Carlyle, his keenest criticism is called out by his perception of Carlyle’s failure in this respect. “Had Mr. Carlyle been fitted out completely by nature as an artist, he would have had an ideal in his work which would have lifted his mind away from the muddier part of him, and trained him to the habit of seeking and seeing the harmony rather than the discord and contradiction of things.” Again we read in this passage the unconscious reflection of its writer’s own mind, which once had been far enough away from this habit. Nothing in Carlyle appears to interest him more than the lawlessness into which his exuberant humor had led him, and the narrow escape he had had of being a great poet, and he sums up his judgment of “Frederick the Great” by saying that “it has the one prime merit of being the work of a man who has every quality of a great poet except that supreme one of rhythm, which shapes both matter and manner to harmonious proportion, and that where it is good, it is good as only genius knows how to be.”

In the same number of the _Review_ which holds this article on Carlyle appears a shorter one on Swinburne, which, though dealing with a more occasional subject, also illustrates the temper in which Lowell was now writing, and has a special interest, since it deals directly with poetry and intimates, that when treating of a contemporary writer his mind was most set on that aspect of poetry which ignores the distinction of time. The phenomenon of a new poet sends him back into an inquiry into the very realities of poetry itself. Though he has a few specific criticisms of Swinburne’s “Chastelard” and his “Atalanta in Calydon,” the theme which interests him most is the possibility of reënacting antiquity in poetry, and he devotes the larger part of his paper to a demonstration of the truth that the result of all such endeavors is to produce the artificial and not the artistic. In a letter to Mr. Stedman, written apparently when this subject was fresh in his mind, he repeats his conclusion with the force of a friendly letter writer. Mr. Stedman had thanked him for a review of his poem, “Alice of Monmouth,” but asks his judgment of another poem he had written on an antique theme. “I will answer frankly,” wrote Lowell, “that I did not like Alektryon, and don’t think him at all to be compared to his sister Alice,--a strutting fellow that wants to make me believe he can crow in ancient Greek. Alice is Christian, modern, American, and that’s why I like her. I don’t believe in these modern antiques--no, not in Landor, not in Swinburne, not in any of ’em. They are all wrong. It’s like writing Latin verses--the material you work in is dead.”

Though Lowell had thus turned with avidity to his more congenial field of letters, he was not yet to be released from the duty imposed upon him by his editorship of the _Review_, and by his own political thought, of taking part in the discussion which Reconstruction raised. In the same number of the _North American_ which contained the two papers just noted, he wrote also an article on “The President on the Stump,” which, after a cursory consideration of the growing division between President Johnson and Congress, closed with a hypothetical address delivered to a Southern delegation by an imaginary President Johnson. Into this address Lowell packed his convictions as to the attitude which should be taken toward the Southern States by a President who had come from the South. It was so unusual for Lowell to dramatize, even in poetry, that this assumption has a singular interest, and, barring the element of Southern birth, is a close copy of Lowell’s mind at this time. Every man of thought has his dream of action, and we can read in this speech how Lowell would have translated his ideals of truth, freedom, and justice into executive acts, could he, who had watched the conflict closely, have had the chance that poets picture of being king for a day.

Perhaps all this was in his mind when he wrote in his last “Biglow Paper:”--

“Ez I wuz say’n’, I hain’t no chance to speak
So’s ’t all the country dreads me onct a week,
But I’ve consid’ble o’ thet sort o’ head
That sets to home an’ thinks wut _might_ be said.”

This last paper, “Mr. Hosea Biglow’s Speech in March Meeting,” followed in the May _Atlantic_, and said over again the same lesson in the freer form of verse and with the more familiar dramatic impersonation of the Yankee countryman. It is an illustration of the greater carrying power of Lowell’s verse over his prose that the shrewd political philosophy which lies in the two series of the “Biglow Papers,” closely as it applied to the political situations in 1846-1848 and 1861-1866, has come again into play in the very different situation in national politics following the war for the independence of Cuba, so that while one would find in the newspapers but few quotations from Lowell’s “Political Essays” he would find plenty of lines from the “Biglow Papers.”

These two productions were not to be the last of his political writings at this period. One more was to follow in October, but the impulse to take part in the discussion of national events was relaxed, and he was falling back into his more congenial life of devotion to letters in the quiet retreat of Elmwood. “My dear Charles,” he writes to Mr. Norton, 30 May, 1866, “I snatch a moment from the whirl of dissipation to bring up for you the annals of Cambridge to the present date. In the first place, Cranch and his daughters are staying with us--since last Saturday. On that day I took him to club, where he saw many old friends (he has not been here for twenty years, poor fellow!) and had a good time. We had a pleasant time, I guess. With me it was a business meeting. I sat between Hoar and Brimmer, that I might talk over college matters. Things will be arranged to suit me, I rather think, and the salary (perhaps) left even larger than I hoped.

“Cranch and I amuse me very much. They read their poems to each other like a couple of boys, and so contrive for themselves a very good-natured, if limited, public. I cannot help laughing to myself, whenever I am alone, at these rhythmical debauches. The best of it is that there is always one at least who is never bored. I like him very much, though it always makes me a little sad that a man with so many gifts should lack the one of being successful. He brought with him a fairy story full of fancy, and illustrations, most of which are as charming and original as can be. I hope to get Fields to publish it.[24] Cranch wants some such encouragement very much. He begins to think himself born under an ill star. I fancy the trouble is that he was not brought up to work, in a nation of day laborers. You know I have a natural sympathy with the butterflies as against the ants and the bees, and I think they will all be put in a heavenly poor-house one of these days, with the industrious rich to work for them, and buy their books and pictures. Cranch always reminds me of Clough, so you may be sure I like to have him here. We shall enjoy each other very much if we don’t quarrel over our poems.

“You will see my verses to Bartlett in the next _Atlantic_,[25] and I guess you will like ’em. They seemed to me fanciful and easy when I corrected the proof, with some droll triple rhymes....

“It is now high time to change the conversation and speak of the weather. We are having it of the rarest April sort--whims of sunshine dappling a continuous mood of rain erratic thunderclaps ending like my novel with the first chapter--promising notes of fine to-morrows ending not in bankruptcy but liquidation. In short, the clerk of the weather seems suddenly to have bethought him of his remissness with the watering-pot for the last two years and is making it up all at once. All the wells (except, of course, that of Truth) will be filled again and milk will be plenty once more. The greenness of everything is delicious. I feel as if I were sprouting myself, so keen is my farmer’s sympathy with my beets and carrots, and especially with a new field of grass which was becoming _too_ emblematic of flesh, and has been snatched from the very jaws of death by this intervention of Jupiter Pluvius. I had just had a new pump set in the well at the foot of the garden, and had begun to think it would be merely a dry symbol, but this will set all its arteries a-throbbing.

“Your dream of a stock-farm is a delightful one (there is a yellow-bird in the cherry-tree by my window drinking the tremulous rain diamonds that hang under the twigs), but I fear that the only stocks I am young enough for now are in railroad companies and the like whose golden fleeces yield a half yearly clip. I am satisfied, though, that nobody has such a sympathy with the seasons and feels himself so truly a partner in the trade of nature as a farmer. I find great pleasure in my own little ventures in this Earth-ship of ours on her annual voyages, and shall even grow jolly again if my college duties are so arranged next year that I shall get rid of some of my worries, and be able to give my trees and crops the encouragement of a cheerful face. Depend upon it, they feel it and grow in proportion. Fancy the disheartenmentof a regiment of cabbages or turnips when they see the commander-in-chief with a long face! Where shall they find the cheerful juices that shall carry them through a long drouth, or the happy temper that is as good as an umbrella to ’em in dull wet spells of weather, if their natural leader be as bloodless as the one, or show no better head than the other? Doesn’t it stand to reason?”

Six weeks later he wrote to the same friend: “The hot weather we have been having for some time--95° for nearly a week together--has pretty nearly used me up. It has made me bilious and blue, my moral thermometer sinking as the atmospheric rose. But Sunday afternoon we had one of the finest thunderstorms I ever saw, beginning in the true way with a sudden whirl of wind that filled the air with leaves and dust and twigs (_dinanzi va superbo_), followed in due time by a burst of rain. One flash struck close by us somewhere, and I heard distinctly the crack of a bough at the moment of its most intense redness. Just at sunset the cloud lifted in the west, and the effect was one that I always wish all my friends could be at Elmwood to see. The tops of the English elms were turned to sudden gold, which seen against a leaden background of thundercloud had a supernatural look. Presently that faded, and after the sun had set came a rainbow more extravagant than any I ever saw. There were seven lines of the glory looking like the breaking of quiet surf on the beach of a bay. First came one perfect bow--the more brilliant that the landscape was dark everywhere by the absence of the sunlight. Gradually another outlined itself at some distance above, and then the first grew double, triple, till at last six arches of red could be counted. The other colors I could only see in the two main bows. I thought it a trick of vision, but Fanny and her sister counted as I did. A triple arch was the most I had ever seen before. Here is a diagram.... _d_ is the spectator for whom this wonderful show was exhibited. I should have made _d_ a capital, thus, _D_, to indicate his importance in the scene. For have I not read in some old moralist that God would not have created so much beauty without also creating an eye to see and a soul to feel it? As if God could not be a poet! The author of the book of Genesis knew better. However, it is something to have had an eye see what we are seeing; it seems to double the effect by some occult sympathy, and my rainbows are always composed of one part rain, one part sunshine, and one part blessed Henry Vaughan with his ‘Still young and fine,’ and his ‘World’s gray fathers in one knot!’ The older I grow the more I am convinced that (there) are no satisfactions so deep and so permanent as our sympathies with outward nature....

“In some moods I heartily despise and hate myself, there is so much woman in me ( ... I mean no harm. I was designed, sketched rather, for a man). Why, I found myself the other day standing in a muse with something like tears in my eyes, before a little _pirus_ that had rooted itself on the steep edge of the runnel that drains the meadow above Craigie’s pond, and thinking--what do you suppose? Why, how happy and careless the life of such a poor shrub was compared with ours! But I was in a melancholy and desponding mist of mind, and I snatched myself back out of it to manlier thoughts. But the reality and sincerity of the emotion struck me as I mused over it, and I set it down on the debtor side of my account. Still, _can_ one get away from his nature? That always puzzles me. Your close-grained, strong fellows tell you that you can, but they forget that they are only acting out their complexion, not escaping it. I did not expect to chase my rainbow into such a miserable drizzle, but for that very reason I will let it go as I have written it, though I am rather ashamed of having uncovered my nakedness so plumply. In spite of the heat we have had rain enough to keep the country beautiful, and my salt marshes have been in their glory. The salt grass is to other grass like fur compared with hair, and the color of the ‘black grass,’ and even its texture at the right distance remind one of sable. I have been making night studies of late, having enjoyed, as folks say, a season of sleeplessness, and I saw the dawn begin the other night at two o’clock. The first bird to sing was a sparrow. The cocks followed close upon him, and the phœbe upon them. The crows were the latest to shake the night out of them.

“The Corporation have given me a tutor and cut my salary down to $1500. But I think they will give me what they call a ‘gratuity’ if the college funds justify it. If not, I must take to lecturing.... I am called away to the hayfield, so good-by. I work more or less every day out of doors and like it. I am getting back as well as I can to my pristine ways of life.”

He had wished to purchase a little immunity from the routine of college duties, but he needed to increase his income, for the change in his college work, though it gave him more liberty, left him with smaller salary. Except for the months when his editorship of the _Atlantic_ and his college professorship had jointly given him a fairly comfortable livelihood, he had always been in an impecunious condition; his writings had not been especially remunerative, and as he was somewhat dependent on outside pressure for a stimulus to work, it is probable that his need of money had furnished this stimulus.

So this summer he was not unwilling to help himself out with some special tasks on the _British Poets_. “My job,” he writes, “is correcting Dryden for the next edition. I enjoy it, to be sure, but it is rather wearisome. I have always had a great respect for Dryden’s solid ability, and I am glad to read him in this minute way as a study of his language. I have long thought that he was the last writer of really first-rate English prose. Make every possible deduction, and I still think so, and I believe it is because of two things: first, that the language had not yet been sophisticated by writing for the press; and second, that he wrote as a gentleman rather than as an author. It is easy to see why his verse has been so much admired, it is so vigorous and easy, and there is such mastery of language. Dryden _knew_ a great deal, and uses his knowledge with an ease of manner that is very charming to me.

“The work takes about three days to a volume, and I have the first two to go over again, because I corrected more than they are willing to pay for (I mean to the printer). I find some strange nonsense, chiefly caused by punctuation. The Donne, on which I spent three or four weeks of unremitting work, I have literally lost. Little & Brown don’t want the expense of printing, and I have lost the book; can’t find it anywhere. I find another copy--but perfectly clean!”[26]

A proposal was made at this time that he should write the life of Hawthorne. Longfellow suggested this to Mrs. Hawthorne, who talked with Lowell about it. He was attracted by the subject, and saw that he would have abundant material, for Mrs. Hawthorne told him that there were seventeen volumes of notes, beside the letters which could be collected. After consideration, however, Mrs. Hawthorne feared to take the risks involved in having the precious manuscripts go out of her hands, and the plan was abandoned, Mrs. Hawthorne contenting herself with printing a portion of the notes in the _Atlantic_, and afterward issuing the several volumes of Passages from the American, English, French, and Italian Note-Books.

Lowell was busy also this summer getting ready for publication the second series of the “Biglow Papers,” his chief labor being in the long Introduction, which is a justification of his use of the rustic New England form by a careful tracing of many of the words and phrases and local pronunciation to the English usage of the seventeenth century, brought over by the early settlers and domesticated under conditions which served to preserve them in common speech. And here may be printed an unfinished letter, written a few months later, in which he sets forth more familiarly some of his linguistic views: “I am not obstinate, but Shakespeare does not tack his ‘lesses’ to nouns but to verbs. He says ‘viewless winds’ in ‘Measure for Measure,’ and means as Milton does in ‘Comus’ (‘I must be viewless now’) ‘invisible.’ So in ‘Hamlet,’ when he says ‘woundless air’ he means ‘invulnerable,’ as you will see by turning to Act I., scene i. I admit that _less_ ought to be joined to a noun (as in German _los_ always is), but I think one may sin with Shakespeare or Milton, for my instance from which latter I have to thank Malone. I grant that Whittier is no authority--though I suspect he is right in rhyming for the ear and not for the eye, as used to be the fashion. So long as we don’t pronounce _arrums_ Hibernice, why shouldn’t he rhyme it with psalms? Not that I would. I would be conservative about pronunciation,--the test of good-breeding,--and would leave idioms to the grace of God, where they properly belong. Boys and blackguards have always been my masters in language. I have always felt that if I could attain to their unconscious freedom, I were safe. I would not insist (for example) with our excellent _Daily Advertiser_ on ‘house to be let,’ because it is unidiomatic and because it is glossologically wrong. We took it directly from the French _maison à louer_. Nor would I say ‘by auction,’ because ‘at’ is quite as good. Nor would I say ‘the house is in process of erection’ for ‘the house is building.’”

Lowell dedicated his second series of “Biglow Papers” to Judge Hoar. “A very fit thing,” he writes, “it seems to me, for of all my friends he is the most genuine Yankee.” In the same letter he writes with eagerness of a new poetic enterprise he had undertaken, or rather of an old one revived.[27] “I have been working hard, and if my liver will let me alone, as it does now, am likely to go on all winter. And on _what_ do you suppose? I have taken up one of the unfinished tales of the ‘Nooning,’ and it grew to a poem of near seven hundred lines! It is mainly descriptive. First, a sketch of the narrator, then his ‘prelude,’ then his ‘tale.’ I describe an old inn and its landlord, barroom, etc. It is very homely, but right from nature. I have lent it to Child and hope he will like it, for if he doesn’t I shall feel discouraged. It was very interesting to take up a thread dropt so long ago, and curious as a phenomenon of memory to find how continuous it had remained in my mind, and how I could go on as if I had let it fall only yesterday.” This was “Fitz Adam’s Story,” which Mr. Child found no difficulty in liking, so that Lowell sent it at once to Mr. Fields for the _Atlantic_, where it appeared in January, 1867. “I mean to work ahead as fast as I can with the rest,” he wrote to Mr. Fields, and in the spirit which then possessed him he had high hopes of completing “The Nooning,” having already, as we have seen, various parts of it ready for final articulation. He wrote Mr. Fields again, 8 November, 1867, when urged to send more of the poem: “I cannot get into the mood of my Nooning story just now,” but evidently he hoped still to go on with it, for he did not include “Fitz Adam’s Story” in his next collection of poems published in 1869; yet when twenty years more had gone by, and “The Nooning” was still in fragments, he saw that there was no likelihood of his ever producing the rounded whole, and so included “Fitz Adam’s Story” in his latest collection with an apologetic note.

“I am already beginning to feel the relief from those confounded recitations,” he wrote a month or so after the fall term at college began, “both in better health and better spirits.” He sent Mr. Fields not only this poem for the _Atlantic_, but a fairy tale and a poem for _Our Young Folks_. “You asked me once,” he writes, “for a fairy story, and I suppose never expected to hear of it again. But it is not safe to cast bread on _my_ waters. I invented a kind of one at once, and yesterday and the day before contrived to write it, partly to spite an infernal pain I was suffering, and which got me under at last. I think I have told it simply enough, and was surprised to find how easy it was to write in words mostly of one syllable. I think there are some pleasant humors in it, but it may have suffered from my being in such a wretched condition while I wrote it. Please read it yourself, and show it to no one. To tell the honest truth, I have never read _Our Young Folks_, and so do not know whether it is suitable or not. Perhaps I could write it over again, but that might spoil it, for I might not be able to fancy myself so vividly telling it again as I did before.

“Also: I have a jolly little poem that would do for a Christmas number, called ‘Hob Gobbling’s Song,’ written years ago for my nephews, now all dead. Just think of it! and three of the four in battle. Who could have dreamed it twenty years ago?

“You will think I am mad to bombard you thus, but no, I am only beginning to feel the sort of spring impulse of my college freedom. I mean to work off old scores this winter if I can.”

The fairy tale, “Uncle Cobus’s Story,” had pleasant fancy in it, but was curiously literary in its allusions and in its thinly concealed moral a parable of Lowell’s own life, with its struggle for supremacy of the two fairies Fan-ta-si-a and El-bo-gres. The song might fairly be called a New England survival of Elizabethan fairy lore.

As a result of his industry during the summer and early fall, he was able to write at the end of October: “I have in my pocket $820 for my last six weeks’ work, and mean for the first time in my life to make an investment of money earned!”