Chapter XI: Poetry and Prose (2)

The pain, by the way, which he tried to assuage by writing, was some facial trouble which resulted in a swelling making him look, as he said, “like a hornpout with the mumps.” He had an odd experience with ether which he thus describes: “The ether didn’t deaden the pain a bit, that I could discover. Its only effect was to make my head feel as if it were violently waggled to and fro. One odd result there was. For a moment, I lost entirely my present personal identity, and absolutely _was_ (without anything of that sense of dualism which commonly goes along with and criticises hallucination) twelve years old and getting ready to go out shooting as I used. Odd as it seems, it was a most painful sensation, and all the rest of the night I was haunted by a feeling that my life was the merest illusion, and I a poor puppet worked by some humorous higher power, who could by a jerk put me back at Mr. Wells’s school if he liked.”

In the midst of all this congenial labor he was moved also to write one more political article, which appeared in the _North American_ for October, 1866. The President and the Secretary of State had formed that curious combination which may be said still somewhat to baffle students of our political history, and Lowell wrote of it,--the last of his series of political writings growing out of the great conflict and the early movements toward reconstruction. Under the title, “The Seward-Johnson Reaction,” he examines all the elements in the situation, the President, the Secretary, Congress, and the two parties, and, as before, his study is less an analysis of the component parts than a reassertion of those fundamental principles which it was his political philosophy to seek for and expound. Trust in the people was the prime article of his creed; hence he sought chiefly for evidence of the settled drift of the nation’s conviction, conscience, and instinct. The great stake played for in the war was, in his words, the “Americanization of all America, nothing more and nothing less.” Yet with all his clear sight of the ideal and his confidence in the ultimate reason of national thought, Lowell was not a vague theorist nor a contemner of political activity. On the contrary, one of the most impassioned sentences in the paper is that in which he speaks of the dignity of politics. “Now that the signs of the times,” he says, “show unmistakably to what the popular mind is making itself up, they [members of Congress] have once more a policy, if we may call that so which is only a calculation of what it would be ‘safe to go before the people with,’ as they call it. It is always safe to go before them with plain principles of right, and with the conclusions that must be drawn from them by common sense, though this is what too many of our public men can never understand. Now joining a Know-Nothing ‘lodge,’ now hanging on the outskirts of a Fenian ‘circle,’ they mistake the momentary eddies of popular whimsy for the great current that sets always strongly in one direction through the life and history of the nation. Is it, as foreigners assert, the fatal defect of our system to fill our highest offices with men whose views in politics are bounded by the next district election? When we consider how noble the science is,--nobler even than astronomy, for it deals with the mutual repulsions and attractions, not of inert masses, but of bodies endowed with thought and will, calculates moral forces, and reckons the orbits of God’s purposes toward mankind,--we feel sure that it is to find nobler teachers and students, and to find them even here.”[28]

With this paper Lowell took leave of political writing for a long time.[29] When next we meet him in this field it will be after certain practical experience in the field of politics has given its own color to his mind. Now, as if he had shaken off an irksome task, he turned more entirely to literature. The next three or four years were occupied, as the calendar of his published writings shows, with diligent excursions in letters, both in prose and verse. The article on Percival which appeared in the _North American_ for January, 1867, was an amusing treatment of a commonplace book, but it was worth preserving for its humorous presentation of the touchstones of genuine poetry; and from what Lowell says in his letters of the slight personal acquaintance he had with Percival, it is quite likely that the encounter gave a little fillip to his interest; yet one may be permitted to look a little more closely and find in Lowell’s characterization of the poetic temperament and sentimentalism, when laid bare through the absence of the clothing of sound sense and humor, a distant reflection on weaknesses of which he was conscious when in the depressed mood. There was an assimilating faculty which he possessed that led him, when reading lives and records especially of literary careers, to suffer somewhat as the young student of medicine who is never quite sure that he is not acting as a sort of proxy for the cases whose diagnosis is laid before him. It is curious to find Lowell, when engaged on Lessing’s life and works, which he reviewed in the April _North American_, writing to Mr. Norton:[30] “I find somewhat to my surprise from his letters that he had the imaginative temperament in all its force. Can’t work for months together, if he tries, his forehead drips with _angstschweiss_; feels ill and looks well--in short, is as pure a hypochondriac as the best. This has had a kind of unhealthy interest for me, for I never read my own symptoms so well described before.” And the article itself, if one reads it with Lowell’s thought about himself in mind, becomes a curiously parallel record, even to external circumstances, of the two men. It would, of course, be untrue to say that Lowell was thinking of himself when he was writing of Lessing, but I cannot help suspecting, as I read the article, that there was a subconsciousness which gave a force to certain passages, and that Lowell’s interest in his subject was heightened by the plucking at his sleeve of his own memories and ambitions.

In writing for the _North American_ the articles on great literature which were afterward reproduced in his books, Lowell was not only drawing upon a liberal familiarity with most of the subjects from repeated readings, but he was sometimes availing himself of earlier treatment in the form of lectures which he had given in connection with his college work. He complains, when preparing his article on Rousseau, that he is always bothered when he tries to do anything with old material, as he was in this case, inserting in his paper patches from college lectures; and any one who has had the experience appreciates the difficulty of turning the _oratio directa_ of the lecture into the _oratio obliqua_ of the essay,--to mention but one of the “bothers” of such work. But a comparison of the manuscript of Lowell’s college lecture with the text of the printed article shows two things: first, that in going back to his old lecture, Lowell easily took fire from his own words and, in copying a sentence, ran on into a fuller, more finished conclusion. For example, in comparing the sonnets of Petrarch with those of Michelangelo, he says alike in lecture and in article: “In them (i. e. in Michelangelo’s) the airiest pinnacles of sentiment and speculation are buttressed with solid mason-work of thought, of an actual, not fancied experience.” In the lecture, he goes on: “You seem to feel the great architect in them. Petrarch’s in comparison are like the sugared frostwork upon cake.” In the article, however, he adds to “fancied experience,” “and the depth of feeling is measured by the sobriety and reserve of expression, while in Petrarch’s all ingenuousness is frittered away into ingenuity. Both are cold, but the coldness of the one is self-restraint, while the other chills with pretence of warmth. In Michelangelo’s you feel the great architect: in Petrarch’s the artist who can best realize his conception in the limits of a cherry-stone.”[31]

Again, it is evident from the comparison that Lowell’s direct address in speaking to his class from the written lecture was in form of sentences little different from what he used when writing for the public. In each case, his spontaneity was uppermost; he was not especially aware, as he wrote, either of audience or of readers. In revising his articles for book publication he altered the impersonal _we_ of the reviewer to the _I_ of the author, and in doing so merely strengthened the natural voice in which he spoke. Such papers as “A Good Word for Winter,” or “My Garden Acquaintance,” are scarcely more direct in the relation of author and reader than are those papers which have the external form of book reviews. It was the personality of the man at home in a hospitable manner that found this expression, and just as some of his happiest letters were written to persons whom he scarcely knew, but happened to be called out by some apt occasion, so he wrote and lectured, except on the most formal themes, with a freedom which was neither disturbed nor excited by audience or readers. One may notice a difference in this respect between the political papers and the literary essays. The _I_ scarcely is at home in the former.

The Dante Club had finished its task, and Longfellow’s translation was published in 1867. The affectionate relation between the two men found more than one poetic expression during their long neighborly existence, and when Longfellow’s sixtieth birthday occurred in 1867 Lowell wrote a poem, and printed it in the daily paper which he knew would be laid on Longfellow’s breakfast-table. On the appearance of the Dante he wrote, with Mr. Norton, a joint review which appeared in the _North American_. Of his own brief part he wrote in humorous dismay to his collaborator: “I could only wish that the latter part had been more critical if it were but for Longfellow’s sake. It’s lucky, perhaps, that I got almost crazy over the insertion I was to make in it, or I should have rushed into the thing myself--for, though I think his version (as you know) truly admirable, there are some things to be questioned in it. However, all the better that I couldn’t. I say I was almost crazy. You see I went up to Shady Hill--picking up Longfellow on the way and it was _very_ hot, and I brought away an armful of translations, just cutting out Howells, who was on the same errand. I came home with my prize, wet through with the only sure result of all earthly toils, and began to compare. Good heavens! I had Cayley and Ford, and Dayman and Ramsay (and lots of others that made me ’d--’ say), and Brooksbank and Wright, and last Rossetti. Well, I addled my brains over ’em--my tables were heaped, my floor stumbly with my a-versions, as I called them when I looked _at_ them, my in-versions when I read them. Now, to begin with, I have read Dante so much that I can’t remember a line of him--in short, ’twas _infandum renovare dolorem_. I spent three days in bothering through what will make two pages.”

The critical reviews of Longfellow’s Dante from the hands of competent scholars were few, but one published in a daily journal called out a letter from Lowell to the friend who sent it to him, which gives with frankness Lowell’s estimate of the translation. “The review,” he writes, “does not change my opinion of Mr. Longfellow’s translation--not as the best possible, by any means, but as the best probable.... Nobody who is intimate with the original will find any translation of the ‘Divina Commedia’ more refreshing than cobs. Has not Dante himself told us that no poetry can be translated? But, after all is said, I think Mr. Longfellow’s the best thus far as being the most accurate. It is to be looked on, I think, as measured prose--like our version of Job, for example, though without that mastery of measure in which our Bible translators are unmatched except by Milton. I mean where they are at their best, as in Job, the songs of Debórah and Barak, the death of Sisera, and some parts of the Psalms. Mr. Longfellow is not a scholar in the German sense of the word, that is to say, he is no pedant, but he certainly _is_ a scholar in another and perhaps a higher sense, I mean in range of acquirement and the flavor that comes of it.”

Specific criticism, with all the painstaking of which he was capable, was but the obverse of the medal which Lowell struck in his literary work. On the face was his generous delight in his books. “The Nightingale in the Study,” written in the summer of 1867, holds in capital form a genuine confession that there was an appeal to him from nature in literature which did not antagonize the appeal made to him by the world of natural beauty, yet sometimes constrained and invited him in tones he could not resist, even though the birds without were calling him. Mr. Leslie Stephen who visited him in the summer of 1868, renewing an acquaintance begun five years earlier and ripening into a friendship which meant much to Lowell ever after, has given a pleasant account of the impression made upon him by the poet in his study at Elmwood. “All round us,” he says, “were the crowded book-shelves, whose appearance showed them to be the companions of the true literary workman, not of the mere dilettante or fancy biographer. Their ragged bindings and thumbed pages scored with frequent pencil marks implied that they were a student’s tools, not mere ornamental playthings. He would sit among his books, pipe in mouth, a book in hand, hour after hour; and I was soon intimate enough to sit by him and enjoy intervals of silence as well as periods of discussion and always delightful talk.”[32]

It was a quarter of a century since Lowell had collected his fugitive poems, though he had meantime published the second series of “The Biglow Papers,” and when 1868 came in he was moved to make a new volume which should include the poems he had been printing, chiefly in the _Atlantic_. It was with this in mind that he took up a fragment of a poem written a score of years before, rewrote and added to it, designing to make it the title poem in the volume. He printed it first in the June _Atlantic_, under the title “A June Idyll.” In sending it he wrote to Mr. Fields: “In the first flush of having just finished and copied it (for which I was obliged to miss Dickens last night) I am inclined to think there is something characteristic.... Surely there are good bits in it, and it is good for more than usual, or good for nothing. If I haven’t made a spoon, I have certainly spoiled a horn that would have turned out a very good one. You sometimes find fault with my names. I have called this ‘A June Idyll,’ which is just what it is. Do you object?”

Mr. Fields, either himself or through a friend, wrote a very appreciative notice of the poem in the _Boston Advertiser_, which drew from Lowell this response to his friendly editor:--

“Such a notice of my Iddle
Met my eyes in the _Advertiser_!

“‘To order,’ thought I, ’no, fiddle!
’Tis the dull world growing wiser.

“‘My forehead they twine with bayses,
They’re eager to shout hosanna,
My style as pure epic they praises
Where they used to add acuanha.’

“‘’Tis always their fate whom at christening
Your genuine Helicon’s spilt on;
Long ears are the latest at listening,
_Vide_ Wordsworth _passim_ on Milton.’

“So I read it aloud to my family,
One delicate phrase after t’other,
And surely the good little Sammle he
Wasn’t sadder at leaving his mother

“Than I when I came to the close of it,
For I wanted, as I’m a sinner,
(Such poetry seemed in the prose of it)
To keep up my reading till dinner.

“But now, oh worst of collapses,
My Temple of Fame is in ruins,
Its forecourt, nave, transept, and apse is
A shelter for foxes and bruins!

“For all of my Public Opinion
With the wind in its sails to drive it
To the port of supreme dominion
Turns out most especially private.

“My Fame’s accoucheur sadly yields his
Place up to the Deputy Cor’ner,
For my Public Opinion was Fields’s,
My tradewind a puff from the ‘Corner.’”

That the poem at once found disinterested friends is evident from the letter which Lowell writes in acknowledgment of the praise which the poet, Dr. Parsons, gave it. “Something more than half of it,” Lowell says, “was written more than twenty years ago, on the death of our eldest daughter; but when I came to complete it, that other death, which broke my life in two, _would_ come in against my will, so that you were right in your surmise. I was very glad you liked it, and your letter touched me deeply, as you may well conceive.”

In September Lowell made out a tentative list of the poems to be included in the volume, and wrote to Mr. Fields: “I think it best not to include any humorous poems in this collection. They can come by and by, if they are wanted. They would jar here. Some I may be able to shorten somewhat in printing, but commonly I find it hard work to improve them after they are dry, though I seem to see well enough where and how much they need it. The poems of the war I shall put by themselves at the end, so as to close with the Ode as I begin with the Idyll. How I do wish the whole of them were better--now that I am putting them between stiff covers to help them stand alone! ‘Bad is the best’ is a good proverb--but how if the best is bad? Well, here and there one catches a good strain, but I feel very hopeless about them.”

Lowell meant to call his volume “A June Idyll and other Poems,” but Mr. Fields pointed out that Whittier’s new volume just about to appear was to carry the title of “A Summer Idyll.”[33] Lowell retorted: “Why the devil should Whittier bag my title? I can’t claim a copyright in ‘Idyll,’ that is in the dictionary--but, June ‘Idyll’ was mine. It will be thought his poem suggested mine, as it was with the ‘Present Crisis,’ though mine was written two years before. However, J. G. W. is welcome to anything of mine, for he is a trump, and after all the milk is spilt. But if his volume is not advertised, might I not insist? It’s of more consequence to me than to him, for I have nothing else that will look so well in the vanguard. But if it’s all up, how would ‘Appledore and other Poems’ do? It is a pretty name enough, and the poem is one of my longest,--though not, perhaps, the one I would otherwise have put first. My dedication, I think, is good, and that will take the edge off.”

Mr. Fields suggested that he should give the volume the title of his place, “Elmwood,” but Lowell replied: “I can’t bear ‘Elmwood,’ and the more I think of it, the more I can’t bear it--’tis turning one’s household gods upon the town, as it were. No, never! They have endured me for fifty years, and I won’t desert ’em in their old age. Let me have my hermitage to myself. (I had eight visitors this morning--one of whom wanted me to read ‘The Biglow Papers’ to him.) But I have it now. Instead of ‘June Idyll,’ which was the _pis aller_ of a prosaic mind, I shall call it ‘Under the Willows.’ Like all great discoveries, it is simple, and, you may depend upon it, it is _the_ thing. It means everything and nothing. I can’t make the poem over so as to suit ‘Elmwood,’ and so I shall settle upon this, fixed as a butterfly, stable as the Horse-railway stables. You can’t move me. The man that moved Chicago couldn’t move me. I am happy, and discharge my mind of the whole concern. I shall now devote my evening to the ‘Flying Dutchman’ in peace, and write you something clever for the _Atlantic_. I snap my fingers at you and Bazin,[34] wore he even the helmet of Mambrino. Nothing can touch me further. ‘Under the Willows and other Poems’--it satisfies every want, and will be immensely popular. The basketmakers will buy up the first edition and the gunpowder makers the second. Then comes the general public, mad with curiosity to know what the d--l I mean. I am charmed with my own powers of invention. A duller man would have said ‘Under the Elms,’ or some such things. Let me alone for tickling the fancy of a purchaser. _I_ know what they want.”

To Mr. Norton he writes, reciting his tribulations over the name of his book, and adds: “I was suddenly moved to finish my ‘Voyage to Vinland,’ part of which you remember was written eighteen years ago.[35] I meant to have made it much longer, but maybe it is better as it is. I clapt a beginning upon it, patched it in the middle, and then got to what had always been my favorite part of the plan. This was to be a prophecy by Gudrida, a woman who went with them, of the future America.

I have written in an unrhymed alliterated measure, in very short verse and stanzas of five lines each. It does not aim at following the law of the Icelandic alliterated stave, but hints at it and also at the _asonante_, without being properly either. But it runs well and is melodious, and we think it pretty good here, as does Howells.”

Again we quote a passage from Emerson’s unprinted journal, dated December, 1868: “In poetry, tone. I have been reading some of Lowell’s new poems in which he shows unexpected advance on himself, but perhaps most in technical skill and courage. It is in talent rather than in poetic tone, and rather expresses his wish, his ambition, than the uncontrollable interior impulse which is the authentic mark of a new poem, and which is unanalyzable, and makes the merit of an ode of Collins or Gray or Wordsworth or Herbert or Byron, and which is felt in the pervading tone rather than in brilliant parts or lines; as if the sound of a bell, or a certain cadence expressed in a low whistle, or booming or humming to which the poet first timed his step as he looked at the sunset, or thought, was the incipient form of the piece, and was regnant through the whole.”

There were two essays written in the fall of 1868 which are very expressive of Lowell’s nature. “My Garden Acquaintance” records delightfully that attachment to one spot which was made possible not merely by long life at Elmwood, but by that sympathy with life which enabled him to suck the juices from nature, not by roving, but by that attitude of listening and observing which sometimes belongs to home-keeping wits. “A Certain Condescension in Foreigners,” though it was at first sight a clearing of his mind such as his letters repeatedly show, grows warm with that passion for his country and the ideas it stood for, which had been burned into him by his personal experience in the war and by his constant brooding over the deep realities which underlay the meaning of the war. He returned to political writing under stress of need for copy in the January _North American_ with “A Look Before and After.” The _Review_ itself had become somewhat more of a burden to him, for Mr. Norton went abroad in the summer of 1868 for an indefinite stay, and though Mr. E. W. Gurney, who took his place, was competent, Lowell felt the responsibility rather more than when he had easily left the main business to Mr. Norton. Moreover, the special work which he and his friend had undertaken had, in a measure, been accomplished, and the _Review_, though winning a _succes d’estime_, had not that worldly success which reconciles one to drudgery. There is a half-vexed, half-humorous letter to Mr. Fields, dated Elmwood 10 P.M. Thursday, 1868, which was 24 September. “The express has just brought,” he writes, “your note asking for the log of the _North American_ on her present voyage. The N. A. is teak-built, her extreme length from stem to stern post 299 feet 6 inches, and her beam (I mean her breadth of beam) 286 feet 7 inches and a quarter. She is an A 1 _risk_ at the Antediluvian. These statements will enable you to reckon her possible rate of sailing. During the present trip I should say that all the knots she made were Gordian, and of the tightest sort. I extract from log as follows:--

“11 July. Lat. 42° 1´, the first officer, Mr. Norton, lost overboard in a fog, with the compass, caboose, and studden-sails in his pocket, also the key of the spirit-room.

“25 July. Lat. 42° 10´, spoke the Ark, Captain Noah, and got the latest news. 26, 27, 28, dead calm. 29, 30, 31, and 1 August, head winds N. N. E. to N. E. by N. 15 August. Double reef in foretopsl, spoke the good ship Argo, Jason commander, from Colchos with wool.

“17 August, dead calm, schooner Pinta, Capt. Columbus, bound for the New World, and a market, bearing Sou Sou West half South on our weather bow. Got some stores from him.

“20. Capt. Lowell cut his throat with the fluke of the sheet anchor.

“So far the log.

“Now for the comment. Toward the 1st September I received notice that the _Review_ was at a standstill. Mr. Gurney was at Beverly, ill and engaged to be married. I had not a line of copy, nor knew where to get one. I communicated with G. and got what he had--viz: two articles, one on Herbert Spencer, and t’other on Leibnitz. I put the former in type, but did not dare to follow with the latter, for I thought it would be too much even for the readers of the N. A. By and by, I raked together one or two more,--not what I _would_ have but what I _could_. James’s article on Spanish G.”[36] is good and ought to go in. So of the Siege of Delhi. We want _something_ interesting, and we must have some literary notices. As I receive none of the books, of course I had to depend on others for these, and I have got as many as I could. I have edited the number for October because it was absolutely necessary,--not, surely, because I desired it. I have read all the proof and have done all that I agreed _not_ to do when I made my engagement with Crosby & Nichols. All I promised to give them was my name on the cover, and I supposed T. & F. succeeded to their agreement. I have much more than kept my word. The October number can’t be printed by Saturday.

“But I am altogether willing that it should be, only in that case my name must be withdrawn from the cover. I never desired to be its editor, and I put my resignation in your hands. Get some better man, say----, who can write on all subjects equally ill at a moment’s notice. I wash my hands of the whole concern. I will read the rest of the proof of this number if you wish, for that is in the bond, but for January look out for somebody who can make something out of nothing. I recommend----.” Six days later he wrote again:--

“Correct estimates from log thus: 25 September. Lat. 42° 10´. Captain Lowell committed suicide by blowing out his brains with the gafftopsl halyards. There can be no doubt of the fact, as the 2nd officer recognized the brains for his (Cap. L.’s), he being familiar with them.

“30 September. Captain L. reappeared on the deck, having only been below to oversee the storage of ballast, whereof on this trip the lading mainly consists. What was thought to be his brains turned out on closer examination to be pumpkin pie, though the second officer was unconvinced and the Captain himself could not make up his mind.

“The fact is I was cross, and did not quite like being brought up with such a round turn at my time of life. I had done all I could, and was hoping that the literary notices would make up for the rest. I had been disappointed in three body articles by Bigelow, Poole, and Willard (on von Bismarck). Gurney will take hold of the next number and it will all go right. Say beforehand how many sheets you are willing to allow, and we will keep as near the wind as we can, but don’t--well, never mind, but I am as touchy as if I were even poorer than I am.”

The publication of “Under the Willows” brought Lowell some of those expressions of admiration and affection for which the friends of a writer gladly use such occasions. The publishing of a book is like an announcement of an engagement,--an opportunity for one’s friends to show their affection unreservedly. Among the notes which pleased Lowell was one from Mr. Aldrich who had lately come to Boston to edit _Every Saturday_, and in his pleasure he sent a copy of the special edition of the Commemoration Ode with this letter.

ELMWOOD, 23rd December, 1868.

MY DEAR SIR,--That note was so pleasant to an old fellow who
doesn’t think too well of himself, that I can’t help (with a very
good will and a very balky pen) telling you how much pleasure it
gave me. That I don’t deserve all the fine things you say of me
doesn’t make it any the less friendly in you to say them, and I,
for one, frankly confess that I like a little _lubrication_ now and
then. It makes our machine (as they used to call it in the last
century) run easier for a day or two, till its general
ramshackliness reproduces the familiar friction.

Now lest the twins should repeat the tragedy of Eteocles and
Polynikes, and the house of Aldrich be extinguished in an
internecine duel for the possession of that other fatal volume, I
send what will enable your paternal anxiety to make a fair division
between them. If they are proper twins (I am a kind of twins myself
divided between grave and gay) they will be the one sentimental and
t’other humorous. Bequeath one sacred tome to each, and keep for
yourself the cordial feeling that sends both.

This which you now receive has at least the value of rarity. It is
one of twelve copies printed in this form. Think of me after I am
gone on (for in the nature of things you will survive me) as one
who had a really friendly feeling for everything human. It is
better to be a good fellow than a good poet, and perhaps (I am not
sure) I might have shown a pretty fair talent that way, with
proper encouragement. Any how, I wish you and Mrs. Aldrich, and
_the_ Twins a Merry Christmas, and am

Cordially yours,
J. R. LOWELL.

That Lowell himself knew how to give pleasure with praise is evident enough from the several letters which Mr. Norton has printed, to Mr. Aldrich, to Mr. Howells, to Mr. Gilder, and to other younger writers. He was constantly sending pleasant messages and writing notes with unaffected expressions of enjoyment, and his friendly feeling made it easy for the editor of the _Atlantic_ to consult him with reference to contributions even from strangers. Thus he wrote to Mr. Howells: “I would be burned at the stake--nay, I would agree to be shut up alone for an hour with ---- before I would acknowledge (I spelt it without a d!) a poem to be good unless it was so. I would be burned at two stakes, and be shut up with ---- and ---- ere I would say a good word for the verses of a _rising_ young author. But I expect to see and like your poem in the next _Atlantic_. It _is_ good, despite Mrs. Howells and the anapests,--or whatever other kind of pests they were.

“Go by your ear, my dear boy, or by Madam’s and leave Latin prosodies to ---- and the other profound scholars who understand ’em, but be sure that the plot of your little poem is so charming that it will take all the lovers and loved, and who else is worth caring for?

“I tried it on Mrs. Lowell (you know we have a bit of Darby and Joan left in us still) and she purred at once. No: it is good and subtle (or subtile, I don’t know which, thanks to Mr. Nichols), but it is either you like.

“P.S. You have a real vein, so don’t be bothered, but make it as good as you can and thank the gods.”

And again, in answer to some questions Mr. Howells had asked him respecting the Isles of Shoals, apropos of the articles by Mrs. Thaxter then to appear in the _Atlantic_: “‘Londoner’s’ is right. The names of the islands are ‘Haley’s,’ otherwise (and better) ‘Smutty-nose,’ ‘Star,’ always called ‘Star-island,’ ‘Hog,’ which Mrs. T. no doubt calls ‘Appledore,’--the name of a village that once stood on it,--‘Cedar,’ ‘White,’ ‘Malaga,’ and ‘Duck.’ There you have ’em all.

“Now I have a favor to ask of you--_Se io meritai di voi assai o poco_--and that is to have the sheets of the life of Landor sent me. I guess I could make something out of them, which perhaps you _boys_ hardly could. By the way, I was very much pleased with your notice of that fellow’s (Sebright,[37] I think) Congressional reminiscences. It made me laugh, and was so fine (so subtile) that the man himself, despite his name, will never feel the edge of it. I always had great expectations of you,--but I am beginning to believe in you for good. You are the only one that hasn’t cheated me by your blossom. I like your flavor now, as once I did your perfume. You young fellows are dreadfully irreverent--but don’t you laugh--I take a kind of credit to myself in being the first to find you out. I am proud of you. But see how Fate takes me down! As I wrote the words, it began to rain on my hay. _Absit omen._ And may it be long before you are mown!

“As for your gigantic _boongalong_ there in Boston,--I fancy it is like Niagara, a thing that one can reckon mathematically. It is but one voice raised to the nth power or so. And I remember that the Colosseum was where the early Christians used to be martyred. Now I got up this morning at half past six, and therefore count myself among the early Christians.

“I forgot to tell you that George Curtis liked your Venetian poem very much. So did I.”

His position naturally made him the recipient of many commissions for securing the publication of poems and other manuscripts, and his friendliness drew him into many letters of counsel, and it might be encouragement. To one whose acquaintance he had made through a contribution which he had accepted when editor of the _Atlantic_, he wrote in answer to a letter in which she had confessed to discouragement over hostile attack on a more recent work:--

That my note gave you any pleasure gives me a sensible
satisfaction. I am glad to find it _was_ my Miss ---- after all.

You mustn’t be disheartened. If you had written a foolish thing,
don’t you see?--nobody would be attacking it. People don’t bring
artillery to bear on soap-bubbles, but wait till they burst of
themselves. Don’t allow yourself to be shaken from that equipoise
of good sense and good temper that drew my attention so strongly in
your first article. Above all, don’t be drawn into any controversy.
Keep straight on, as if nothing had happened, and if you have
anything in you be sure the world will find it out. Publicity is
one of the painful necessities of authorship. For my own part, I
would give all the praise I ever received for the right to be
valued simply for my personal good qualities alone. But you must
resign yourself. You have given everybody who can command pen, ink,
and paper the right to talk flippantly and ignorantly and
unfeelingly of things into which you have put your very heart’s
blood. But don’t be disheartened. If you honestly _try to think_
(and it was because you seemed to me to do so that I felt an
interest in you) you will come out right in the long run. If you
have the true quality you will at last get the power of _thinking_,
the only abiding satisfaction and security for happiness which this
life or the other for that matter affords, a thing rarer than is
generally supposed. Really to think is to see things as they are,
and when we have once got firm foot-hold on that rock of ages, our
own little trials and triumphs take their true proportions, and are
as indifferent to us, morally, I mean, as the changes of the
weather. I think you have the root of the matter in you, that is,
that you are in earnest to do honest work, and not to flaunt in
the newspapers. For that reason I wish to help you all I can. Don’t
think I am writing such letters as this every week. On the
contrary, I am shy of writing letters at all, especially to women.
But whenever a word from me will cheer you, you shall have it.

I have directed two books to be sent you by express and beg you to
accept them as a token of sincere esteem from your friend,

J. R. LOWELL.

There is another letter drawn out from him by a stranger who was concerned over a case of literary honesty, which is interesting as showing how sensitive Lowell was in all matters pertaining to his art. “You ask,” he writes, “my judgment on a point of literary morals. In the case you set forth I find it hard to judge of the facts without some knowledge of the character of the man, because thoughtlessness, want of moral sensibility, and loose habits of mind generally, may in the particular instance tend to lenify our judgment of the ethical quality of the offence, without in the least changing our opinion of its discreditable nature as respects good scholarship and honest literature. There can be no question that every article (such as you describe) should have had the name of its true author at the head of it, so that no man who read could fail to know whose work he was reading. Nay, I think we should be so scrupulous in such matters as to acknowledge even an apt quotation when we owe it to another man. For example, I suppose I must have read the ‘Divinia Commedia’ of Dante at least thirty times with minute attention and yet it had never occurred to me that _cima di giudizie_ was literally Shakespeare’s phrase, ‘top of judgment,’ till Mr. Dyce pointed it out in a note on ‘Measure for Measure.’ I should never think of using it as an illustration without giving credit to Mr. Dyce. Even had I found the coincidence noted on the margin of my own copy of Dante, I should still have quoted Dyce for it as having first mentioned it in print, in order to avoid even the appearance of evil. I think an honest man can easily resolve any doubt he may have in such matters by asking himself the simple question, Do I gain any credit that does not belong to me by letting it pass for my own? If I do, it is stealing, neither more nor less, for there is no real distinction between picking a man’s pocket of his money and filching the fruits of his industry or thought from a book.

“In literature proper, originality consists of such an energy of nature as enables a man so to infuse thoughts or sentiments common to all with his own individuality as to give them a new character--flavor would be the better word--commending them anew to the general palate. Chaucer is a capital instance in point. He formed himself wholly on foreign models, helped himself to plots, incidents, and reflections from any and everywhere, and yet is on the whole fresher than almost any of our poets. I always liked him the better for remembering in his ‘House of Fame’ the pipes of those

‘little heardgromes
That kepen bestes in the bromes,’

for he was, I doubt not, paying the debt he owed to some nameless minstrel.

“In matters of research and scholarship, the question seems to present itself under a somewhat different aspect. All _learning_ is of necessity to a great extent second-hand--but here also there is a manifest distinction between _appropriating_ another man’s scholarship and _assimilating_ it. In the one case it lies a mere load of indigestible rubbish upon the brain; in the other, it is dissolved and worked over into a new substance, giving sustenance and impulse to one’s native thought. So that after all, whether in literature or scholarship, the point is not so much what a man has taken, as whether he has made something new of what he has taken.[38] If he have _not_, then he should make punctilious acknowledgment of the sources whence he drew. It is one thing to be indebted to a man for a hint that sets us on a path of original research and discovery, and quite another to rob him of his journals and publish them as one’s own. So as to giving credit where it is due; I would not thank a guide-post, but I must pay a guide. I may read by a man’s lamp, but if I tap his gas pipe, I ought to attach a gasometer that shall record precisely how much I borrow.

“The leading case in this branch of literary ethics is the famous one of Schelling _et als._ against Coleridge. For the defence we should take into account the defendant’s lifelong habits of mental dissipation, his own really great learning which might make him careless alike in borrowing and lending, and above all the effect of opium in blurring the memory and deadening the nerves of moral sensation. On the other hand, it would be urged that he _lifted_ (to borrow a word, peculiarly apt here, from the loose dialect of the border) from foreigners whose property would be least liable to identification by his countrymen; he did it by translation and transfusion, thus, as it were, obliterating the marks of former ownership; and above all (in the case of A. W. Schlegel) he did it in oral lectures, thus driving his stolen cattle so hurriedly by in a way to baffle detection.

“You will find in Mrs. Nelson Coleridge’s Introduction to the ‘Biographia Literaria’ an eloquent and even passionate vindication of her father from the charge of plagiarism. It does her honor as a daughter, but is hardly convincing. Coleridge’s acknowledgment of general indebtedness to Schelling and others was, to speak mildly, wholly inadequate, and his evasions in regard to Schlegel leave a very painful impression on the mind. If he was not lying, he was so shamefully inaccurate in dates (to his own advantage) as to have all the appearance of it.

“Now, your case (I mean the one you present) is in many respects very like this--almost identical with it indeed....

“In the old trials, one of the questions on which the jury were called on to pass was, ‘Did he fly for it?’ That is, I suppose, ‘Did he give that proof of conscious guilt?’ I should ask the same question in this case. Is there any evidence of an attempt at concealment?

“But, abstractedly from any opinion we may form of the _person_, the action was one altogether discreditable and contemptible. We cannot be too scrupulous on any point of morals in a country where members of Congress see no dishonor in selling appointments to the Army and Navy.”

Dr. Thomas Hill, who was president of Harvard in 1868, asked Lowell in the summer of that year to look over some papers he had received from Virginia and to give his opinion of them. They were the letters and journals of a Virginian gentleman, Mr. John B. Minor, who had visited New England in 1834, and Lowell found them exceedingly interesting. “Not the least engaging thing in the journal,” he wrote to the lady who had sent the papers, “is the character of the author, everywhere showing itself and everywhere amiable. So far as he is concerned, the whole journal might be printed _verbatim_, for there is not an indiscreet word, much less a breach of hospitality, from beginning to end. At the same time there are, of course, passages here and there which should be omitted in printing--I think not more than two or three at most--where he describes the personal appearance of those he met.”

The next day he wrote to Mr. Fields: “There has been put into my hands to dispose of, the Journal of a Virginia gentleman during a short tour in New England, partly on foot. The date--1834, which is now ages ago. There is not a great deal of it, but I found it truly entertaining. I think I could make selections from it that would run through four or five numbers of the _Atlantic_.... Now, do you want it? and if so, what do you think it would be worth? When I say it is entertaining, I do not mean for fanatics like me, who would cradle I know not how many tons of common earth for a grain of the gold of human nature, but for folks in general. It is not only interesting but valuable, and the character of the author, as it blinks out continually, most engaging. It seems to me remarkable that there is positively not an ill-natured word from the first page to the last. Now you know that I have once or twice pressed Sibylline books upon you which you wouldn’t take. Don’t let this one slip through your fingers. I think it might be published afterwards in a small volume with advantage, but of its adaptation to the _Atlantic_ I have no doubt.”

The journal was printed in the _Atlantic_ in the summer and fall of 1870, Lowell furnishing an introduction to the first number. It was no doubt under the influence of this new acquaintance with a fine type of Southern manhood, that Lowell wrote to Mr. Godkin, 20 November, 1868: “I confess to a strong sympathy with men who sacrificed everything even to a bad cause, which they could see only the good side of; and now the war is over, I see no way to heal the old wounds but by frankly admitting this and acting upon it. We can never reconstruct the South except through its own leading men, nor ever hope to have them on our side till we make it for their interest and compatible with their honor to be so.”[39]

Mr. and Mrs. Fields were proposing to make a journey to Europe in the spring and summer of 1869, and asked Lowell to send his daughter in their company. Lowell wrote in reply, 19 January, 1869: “I have been thinking over your very kind invitation to Mabel, and, after turning it in every possible way, I have come to the conclusion that the only way to treat a generous offer is to be generous enough to accept it. My pride stood a little in the way, but my common sense whispered me that I had no right to feed my pride at my daughter’s expense. And moreover, my dear Fields, you left me a most delicate loophole for my pride to creep out of, in conferring on me a kind of militia generalship of the _Atlantic Monthly_ while you were away. Now, if you will let me make it something real, that is, if you will let me read the proof-sheets, I can be of some service in preventing ---- (for example, merely) from writing such awful English, and mayhap in some other cases, as a consulting physician. Moreover, I should like to translate for _Every Saturday_ something now and then, as, for instance, the article on Déak and the dramatic sketch of Octave Feuillet, lately published in the _Revue de Deux Mondes_. May I?”

While his daughter was travelling with Mr. and Mrs. Fields, Lowell wrote to Mr. Fields a piece of news anticipative of what came to an event a little less than ten years later: “Mabel’s letters overrun with happiness, which I fully share in reading them. I wrote her a long letter about nothing yesterday--but I did not tell her what you may (_as a secret for you three_), that I came very near being sent to Spain, and that in case the Senate should not confirm Sickles in December, the chances for me are the best. Judge Hoar told me when he was here the other day, that Mr. Fish was friendly, and that the Assistant Secretary was ‘zealous even unto slaying,’ as he was himself. So who knows but my name may get into capitals in the triennial catalogues yet? That, after all, is the main thing--for is it not a kind of fame as good as the next? For my own part, I can conceive of no place better to live or die in than where I was born.

“I hope Mabel makes a jolly companion. She always does for _me_.[40] If she is as happy as her letters show her, I think she must. Tell her I should have told her about Spain--but I forgot it. I shall have my choice of castles to live in, if I go there, of my own building.”

“For awhile last spring,” he wrote in December to Mr. Norton, “I thought it possible I might be sent abroad. Hoar was strenuous for it, and I should have been very glad of it then.... However, it all fell through, and I am glad it did, for I should not have written my new poem.”[41] The new poem was “The Cathedral” which was issued in book form at Christmas, 1869, as well as in the _Atlantic_ for January, 1870. He wrote it during the summer vacation and took great pleasure in the writing. He had told Mr. Howells what he was about, and on being asked for the poem for the _Atlantic_ replied: “Up to time, indeed! the fear is not about time, but space. You won’t have room in your menagerie for such a displeaseyousaurus. The verses, if stretched end to end in a continuous line, would go clear round the Cathedral they celebrate, and nobody (I fear) the wiser. I can’t tell yet what they are. There seems a bit of clean carving here and there, a solid buttress or two, and perhaps a gleam through painted glass--but I have not copied it out yet, nor indeed read it over consecutively.”[42] A little later he could write to Miss Norton: “The poem turned out to be something immense, as the slang is nowadays, that is, it ran on to eight hundred lines of blank verse. I hope it is good, for it fairly trussed me at last and bore me up as high as my poor lungs will bear into the heaven of invention. I was happy writing it, and so steeped in it that if I had written to you it would have been in blank verse. It is a kind of religious poem, and is called ‘A Day at Chartres.’”[43] He dedicated the poem with special pleasure to Mr. Fields, who by the bye had persuaded him to substitute the name used for that he had chosen, a change which Lowell regretted in writing to Mr. Stephen, as depriving the poem of certain definite, local, and historical justification. “The Cathedral” drew from Mr. Ruskin warm praise. “The main substance of the poem is most precious to me,” he wrote, “and its separate lines sometimes unbetterable,” and he added some specific criticism on words, which Lowell met with more of his favorite instances of long-lived words brought over in the mental baggage of the early New England settlers. The letter in which he conclusively justifies himself is an excellent example of the reasoning of a philologist to whom words are alive, and not specimens in a museum.[44]

A correspondent had enquired in behalf of a friend, as had Ruskin, for his authority in using “decuman” in the line