James Russell Lowell, A Biography; vol 2/2

In preparing his writings for a new definitive edition, Lowell did much more than merely see to an orderly arrangement. He took great pains with his prose, going over his various papers with care, and tucking in new sentences, or erasing sentences he did not like. He did not meddle much with his poetry; he wished indeed he might get rid of some of his juvenilia, and it was suggested that he should dismiss them to the back-yard of an Appendix. The question was raised if it would be well to date his poems, for the student of literature rightly values the opportunity of marking development in the author he is at work on, but the objection was made that such dating coming from him would be authoritative, and would give sanction to those publishers who lined the legal fence and were ready to seize upon an author’s work the moment it was technically out of copyright, whether the author were living or not, and whether he and his family still had an interest in an undisturbed possession. It was in answer to all this that be wrote me: “Manet litera scripta is a law which might have given points to that of the Medea and Persians. There is no good in squirming. If one could only learn it early enough! I must bear my penalty. I must march through Coventry with my tatterdemalions, whether I like it or not. As for dates, as I have never kept copies of my books (in some of which dates were given), I could not hunt them down without more trouble than it is worth. I had not thought of the bucaneer (I leave out one intrusive c) objection till you suggested it. It is enough. Let them go hang!—both dates and bucaneers. And my Lord Chief Justice Holt (wasn’t it he who first made the unrighteous distinction between the property of authors and that of their worsers?), let him swing amidst of ’em! This settles the Appendix.”

Lowell loved the minutiæ of verbal criticism. It was part of his jealousy for the purity of the language, and meant that touch which the artist gives. Slovenliness was his abhorrence, and free as he was with the vernacular, he made a clear distinction between the undress and the dress occasions of speech. I transmitted to him at this time a criticism which took him to task for the use of the form “try and.” He replied: “I am much obliged to Mr. —— for his friendly interest in my English. The phrase ‘try and,’ like ‘come and,’ is to some extent conversational, but it is idiomatic. There is plenty of authority for it. Here is one from Thackeray, who uses it often:—

“Don’t they try and pass off their ordinary-looking girls? &c.’[107]

“You will observe that in the passage criticised by Mr. —— I am supposing another person to speak, and therefore made it purposely familiar. ‘Come and’ occurs in the first motto of the Bay Colony: ‘Come over and help us’—from the Bible, ‘Come over into Macedonia, and help us.’ Matthew Arnold uses it, and I think it is in Shakespeare also.”

In the spring of 1890 Lowell suffered from what he called the “first severe illness of my life.” It proved indeed to be the beginning of the end. For six weeks he kept his bed, and when he was able at last to crawl about, his physician forbade even the briefest journey. He had been asked to give an address in Vermont, and he was obliged to write: “I am not yet allowed even to drive out or to use my legs except in loitering about my own grounds. So you see that Castleton is as impossible to me as Mecca.... Let me add that I have a special partiality for Vermont as the New England State which maintains most persistently our best traditions.”

To Mr. Godkin he wrote, 29 April: “I have had rather a hard time of it, and for a day or two Wyman had fears. The acute symptoms ceased a month ago, and I am now doing well, but my malady has somewhat demoralized me and I must consent to be an invalid for a good while yet. ’Tis my first experience and I don’t like it. Moralists tell us that pain is for our good, but even the gout has failed to make me think so, and this was even harder to bear.” But he had been amusing himself with some verses on “infant industries” which he sent in this letter, giving them the title, “The New Septimius Felton.” They were printed in the Nation with the title, “The Infant Prodigy.”

On the second of May he wrote from Elmwood to Mr. Gilder, who was to give the poem that year before Φ. Β. Κ. in Cambridge: “You may be sure that I shall support you with my sympathetic presence at Φ. Β. Κ. if my legs will by that time support me, as I have now every reason to think they will. I made an excursion to Cambridge (by horse-car) yesterday, my first adventure of the kind for fourteen weeks, and am none the worse for it.”

Of course a summer in England was out of the question, and Mr. Leslie Stephen, one of the friends who made so large a part of an English summer to Lowell, came instead to America to see Lowell once more in his home. There he found him amongst his books and with the squirrels gambolling outside, but the days of long walks were over, and even the social pleasures which Lowell could share with his guest were few and simple.

He saw the completion of the revision of his writings, and the ten comely volumes standing all a-row were a fair evidence to him that he was not so indolent as he was wont to call himself. His malady left him little power for any continuous work, but he wrote the introduction to a reprint of the first edition of Milton’s “Areopagitica,” a brief paper on Parkman for the Century Magazine, and a trifle for the Contributors’ Club in the Atlantic Monthly. It may be that he glanced at the six volumes of his own prose when he wrote of Milton: “He must have known, if any ever knew, that even in the ‘sermo pedestris’ there are yet great differences in gait, that prose is governed by laws of modulation as exact, if not so exacting, as those of verse, and that it may conjure with words as prevailingly. The music is secreted in it, yet often more potent in suggestion than that of any verse which is not of utmost mastery.” And then follows a brief sentence which has in it the very charm he is praising. “We hearken after it as to a choir in the side chapel of some cathedral heard faintly and fitfully across the long desert of the nave, now pursuing and overtaking the cadences, only to have them grow doubtful again and elude the ear before it has ceased to throb with them.”

It was characteristic of him that he should write to Mr. Gilder: “...Now what I wish to know is, how soon do you want the Parkman? I have just had an offer of a thousand dollars for a short paper of reminiscences, and I think I might make something that would at least do, out of my boyhood. I want the money—I always do, more’s the pity, but want it particularly just now that I may help a friend who is in straits. May I write this first? The Parkman is more than half done, and all thought out.” Plenty of money lay within Lowell’s grasp if he would sell his name and a few hours of work, but he never had been able to make merchandise of his art, and it cost him an effort, when he was asked to name a price, to cast his name into the balance. His publishers, finding him putting off the volume on Hawthorne, held out the promise of a very liberal payment as soon as they could have the book, but he did not get beyond the preliminary business of re-reading his author. Yet the needs of a friend offered the requisite stimulus.

The article in the Contributors’ Club was a humorous defence of certain American locutions and forms of spelling against half-learned objections. It was a return to a favorite theme and contains an amusing sketch of a proof-reader whom we take to be his old friend Mr. George Nichols. The club is in a vein which naturally assumes a half antique manner, and the treatment shows that smiling acceptance of the prejudices of learning which is the scholar’s defence against the logic of the pedant. Even this trifle, unsigned, and inconspicuous in its setting, could not get printed finally without two or three hurried notes from its author, amending and adding to it, and the last proofs were returned with a sigh: “I thought the thing livelier than I find it—it kicked so lustily in the womb. But nothing is good after ’tis born!”

If Lowell was growing old, so also were others with whom he had had lifelong associations. Whittier was twelve years his senior, and though all his life an invalid, never lost his singing voice, and Lowell wrote him, 16 December, 1890:—

Dedications, those shy birds, came fluttering about Lowell in these days. One was in an anonymous volume of verse from a friend dear for her own sake and her mother’s. It had come to him in manuscript first and then revised. When it came first, he wrote: “I am perfectly satisfied with the dedication—how should I not be? But how, in any case, could I look such a gift horse in the mouth? I should like it quand même as a proof of your affection, for that is the main thing; ‘Only, only call me dear!’” and two days later, when an alternate form came: “Yes, I like this better. I could not have discussed what you should say in such a case, but you have shown your woman’s wit (as I thought you would) in divining what I stole from Coleridge and he from Lessing.”

Dr. Weir Mitchell inscribed to him his volume “A Psalm of Death and other Poems,” and Lowell acknowledged the honor: “I am very proud of my book. You know how in the tray for visiting cards those of the more socially distinguished drift to the top (by a kind of natural selection) where they may be better seen of such, and so your volume lies conspicuously on my table by some happy chance, that everybody who comes to see me is sure also to pick it up and look at it. I read it through as soon as I got it and with entire satisfaction. Without partiality I like it better than any of its predecessors, and I have told you how much I like them. Your touch, I think, is more assured, and the slag more thoroughly worked out of the ore. I shan’t tell you which I like best any more than I should think of showing any preference among my grandchildren, though I am conscious that I obscurely feel something of the kind. Without indelicacy, however, I may mention a favorite passage. It occurs on the leaf following the title-page, and seemed to me every way admirable. It will be a treasure to me so long as I live. I have had no sharp attack since the middle of November, but for the last three weeks have been in so wretched a valetudinarian way that Mabel has called in Wyman again. I am beginning to think ’tis Old Age after all. I fancy I know how a bear feels during hibernation when he is getting near the end of his fast.”

A fortnight after this Lowell wrote again of himself, to his friends the Misses Lawrence: “I ought to have written long ago to thank you for your dear remembrance of me at Christmas. It was not ingratitude but sheer unconsciousness of the goings on of Time. I have been a wretched valetudinarian, and the days dribble away from me ere I am aware. I don’t mean that I have been seriously ill again; but I don’t get strong and seem in a lethargy half the time. However, I still reckon on the approaching visit of Doctor Spring, whose prescriptions have always done me good. They are simple enough,—birds and bees and things,—but they do wonders for me. My great bother now is that the least exertion tires me. Yet I believe I am as happy as most men. At any rate, I have had my share. You have been a part of it, and I have you still, thanks to your persistent kindness.

“We have had a better winter than you (thanks to our admirable form of government), but more snow than for several years. This has made the roads merry with sleighs. I myself have been out in a sleigh two or three times and enjoyed it in a quiet way. To-day it is raining and eating away the snow very fast.... Spite of your crusty winter I should have been glad to share it with you. I am so true a lover that I love my London even in the sulks. ’Tis the best place for dwelling in the world except this house where I was born.”

Not long after Lowell began his work at Harvard, he came into his class-room one day, and before giving his regular lecture, spoke to his students a few pointed words regarding Dr. Henry Ware Wales, who had recently died, and whose name is perpetuated in the University by the books he gave and by the Sanscrit professorship which he founded. Dr. Wales had been his friend from boyhood, and Lowell spoke kindly and touchingly of his amiability and generosity; but then he passed to a graver theme suggested by the superb courage with which his friend faced Death. As one reads these passages in connection with Lowell’s own final experience, one cannot fail to hear almost a prophetic voice. Little stress has been laid in these pages on the keen suffering which marked the closing months of Lowell’s life, but suffering there was, almost unbearable. Above this physical pain, however, rose the courageous spirit which does not lose itself in vain murmurings. Something of his cheerful encounter with death appears in his letters, and he made light to his friends of his pain; but the physicians who attended him knew through what he was passing.[108] Hear then how he spoke of Dr. Wales thirty-five years earlier, when he himself was in full vigor.

“I saw him frequently in Rome a few months before his death, and I can speak from my own knowledge. Just before coming to Rome, I had been reading over the Philoctetes of Sophocles, little thinking that I was so soon to find the story of that hero acted over again under my eyes by a coeval and friend. Like Philoctetes, his grievous wound was in a single limb, or rather in a single joint—and yet there he lay, otherwise a strong man, utterly helpless, and hopeful only of that release which comes to all. His island of Lemnos was the bed from which he could not rise. He was perfectly aware of his situation. He had studied medicine, and knew that his death warrant was signed. And here it was that he showed a courage and a firmness which were truly heroic. He told me that he had no hope, that he saw death approaching, and I shall never forget the expression of his face as he said it. He looked into the distance as if he literally saw the messenger of his doom, and measured him with a fearless and unquailing eye, as a braver man measures an antagonist. He spoke alike without levity and without selfish sentimentality. He did not wish to die, nor did he pretend it, but like a true man he fronted Death like an equal, advanced to meet him cheerfully, and did not wait to be dragged to his door like a culprit. I have stood on many battlefields, but here I was present at the battle itself. I saw what the ancients declared the noblest prospect for human eyes,—at once the noblest and most tragic,—a brave man meeting Fate. For it was Fate,—the wound was apparently a trifling one, but the arrow was poisoned. There was no escape.

“Rome was at its gayest, and he knew it. The great Easter throng was gathered before St. Peter’s to receive the blessing of him whom his subjects curse. The great dome shone with that illumination so beautiful that one might almost rank it as a new constellation suddenly created upon the purple evening sky of Italy. And all the while he lay there chained—suffering pains which no opiate could entirely deaden—and uttered no complaint, nay, was cheerful. And now it was that his studies stood him in good stead. As he had been faithful to virtue and honorable aims, so were they now not unfaithful to him. He felt the truth upon his sleepless pillow of Cicero’s pernoctant nobis. Those invisible visitants that thronged his chamber came not with faces of reproach, but with countenances of hope and consolation, on which truly the light of Easter morning, of the Resurrection, was shining.

“It is proverbial that all men die game. But it was not the mere act of dying which tried his courage and serenity. It was the lying in prison under sentence of Death, and it was the prison of the Inquisition, too, where he was hourly tortured.

“It is not, then, as our benefactor, it is not as my schoolmate, classmate, and the friend of nearly twenty-five years, it is not merely as the scholar, that I feel impelled to commemorate him here. It is as an example of how refined studies refine and elevate the character, how they give a vantage ground impregnable to chance and pain and death; it is as the heroic man, quietly and without hope of fame or credit, fighting the good fight in that single combat in which any one of us at any time may be compelled to take up the gauntlet of that foe who fights with enchanted weapons, against which there is no hope.

The spring of 1891 came and Lowell had cheerful hope of further work. He had not dismissed literature because he had collected his writings into a series of books. He meant to write more, to bring together more scattered papers for a volume and to make at least one more collection of his poems. Meanwhile he read—his books were close at hand and his constant friends. He re-read Boswell’s Johnson for the fourth time, and he read the recently published full diary of Walter Scott. He took up novel reading, rather a new taste, and amused himself with contemporaneous society in England as depicted by Norris. At Mr. Bartlett’s suggestion, the whist club to which he had been so faithful held one more meeting which he made out to attend. But though he could go out but little, he had a pleasant glimpse of the world that lay about his house,—the earliest and the best known world to him. He had had a flat dish with stones in it conveniently placed in his garden, and connected it with his water pipe so that his little friends the thrushes, the orioles, and squirrels might have free use of the modern improvements to which he was indifferent enough.[109] Outside of his bedroom window a pair of gray squirrels had nested, and as he was imprisoned there by the illness which now closed in about him, he looked with kindly interest on their gambols in the treetops. His is friends came as he could see them, and he entertained them with humorous diatribes on his gaoler gout. Now and then he could pencil a letter or note, sending a message perhaps to some equally bound sufferer, as when he commiserated his old friend Judge Hoar, shut up with an attack of inflammatory rheumatism, and whimsically cautioned him against mistaking it for the gout which he himself was enduring. A faint smile plays about these last expressions of his kindly nature, as he seems to wave the world aside that he may take his friends by the hand. Death found him cheerful, and he passed away in the middle of the bright summer.

APPENDIX

A. THE LOWELL ANCESTRY

I. Paternal.[110]

1. The first American ancestor of the Massachusetts Lowells was Perceval Lowell, written also Lowle, who came from Somersetshire, England, in 1639, when he was 68 years old, and was one of the early settlers of Newbury, Mass., which was organized in 1642. He wrote a poem on the death of Governor Winthrop, and died in Newbury, 8 January, [1664/5].

2. Perceval Lowell brought with him to America two sons, John and Richard, and a daughter Joan. John, the elder brother, was made a Freeman in 1641; he was a deputy from Newbury to the General Court in 1643-1644. He died in Newbury in 1647, aged 52 years.

3. His son John was born in England, and came to America when he was ten years old, with his father and grandfather. He was a cooper by trade, and made his home first in Boston and then in Scituate. He was thrice married, the third time to Naomi Sylvester, a sister of his second wife; he moved later to Rehoboth, Mass., but finally returned to Boston, where he died 7 June, 1694. He had nineteen children in all.

4. Ebenezer Lowell, fifteenth son of John Lowell, his mother being Naomi [Sylvester] was born in Boston in 1675, and married in 1694 Elizabeth Shailer. He was a cordwainer, which sounds more dignified than shoemaker, and died in Boston, 10 September, 1711.

5. John Lowell, son of Ebenezer and Elizabeth [Shailer] Lowell, was born in Boston, 14 March, 1703/4. He was graduated from Harvard in 1721, and married Sarah, daughter of Noah and Sarah [Turell] Champney, 23 December, 1725. On 19 January, 1726, he was ordained pastor of the Third Parish in Newbury, which became the First Parish in Newburyport, when under that name the part of Newbury up to that time designated the Waterside was set off as a separate township in 1764. Mrs. Lowell died in 1756, and the Rev. John Lowell married again in 1758 Elizabeth, daughter of Robert Cutts, Jr., and widow of the Rev. Joseph Whipple. The Rev. John Lowell died in Newburyport, 15 May, 1767.

6. John, son of John and Sarah [Champney] Lowell, was born in Newbury, 17 June, 1743. He took his bachelor’s degree at Harvard in 1760, and under the arrangement of those days, which recorded the members of a class in order of social dignity, he was seventh in a class of twenty-seven. He studied law in Boston with Oxenbridge Thacher [H. U. 1698], and was admitted to practice in 1763. He returned to his native town and at once became prominent in public affairs. In 1767 he drew up a report upon a letter from the selectmen of Boston concerning the measures to be taken to frustrate the encroachments of Great Britain. He served for several years as one of the selectmen of Newburyport, and in May, 1776, was one of the five representatives of the town in the General Court. He removed to Boston in 1777, and the next year was chosen a representative to the General Court from Boston. In 1779 he was elected a member of the convention for framing the constitution of the State. In 1781 he was chosen a delegate to the Continental Congress. In 1782 he was appointed by Congress one of the three judges of the newly created Admiralty court of appeals. In 1784 he was one of the commissioners to establish the boundary line between Massachusetts and New York. On the adoption of the constitution of the United States, President Washington appointed him Judge of the U. S. District Court in Massachusetts. In 1801 he was appointed Chief Justice of the Circuit Court for the first circuit, under the new organization of the judiciary.

He married, in 1767, Sarah, daughter of Stephen and Elizabeth [Cabot] Higginson, and had by her three children, Anna Cabot, John, and Sarah Champney. His wife, Sarah, died 5 May, 1772, and he married again, 31 May, 1774, Susanna, daughter of Francis and Mary [Fitch] Cabot, by whom he had two children, Francis Cabot, founder of the factory system in Lowell, and Susanna. His second wife, Susanna, died 30 March, 1777, and he married a third time Rebecca, daughter of James and Katharine [Graves] Russell, of Charlestown, and widow of James Tyng, of Dunstable, Mass. By her he had four children, Rebecca Russell, Charles, Elizabeth Cutts, and Mary. He died in Roxbury, Mass., 6 May, 1802.

He was for eighteen years a member of the corporation of Harvard College, and was one of the founders of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. His son, the Rev. Charles Lowell, stated: “My father introduced into the Bill of Rights the clause by which slavery was abolished in Massachusetts. My father advocated its adoption in the convention, and when it was adopted, exclaimed: ‘Now there is no longer slavery in Massachusetts; it is abolished and I will render my services as a lawyer gratis to any slave suing for his freedom if it is withheld from him,’ or words to that effect.”

7. Charles Lowell, son of John and Rebecca [Russell] Lowell, was born in Boston, 15 August, 1782. He was graduated from Harvard College in 1800, travelled in Europe 1802-1805, and on his return to Boston was made pastor of the West Congregational Church in that town, and remained its pastor, either active or emeritus, till he died. He was married, 2 October, 1806, to Harriet Brackett, daughter of Keith and Mary [Traill] Spence. He was elected a member of the Massachusetts Historical Society in 1815, and was its recording Secretary from 1818 to 1833, and corresponding Secretary from 1833 to 1849. He was stricken with partial paralysis in the autumn of 1851, and died 20 January, 1861.

The children of Charles and Harriet Traill [Spence] Lowell, were

When the Rev. Delmar R. Lowell was collecting material for The Historic Genealogy of the Lowells of America, he had for use two letters from Lowell, which he has printed in facsimile in his volume, and kindly permits me to copy.

II. Maternal.[111]

1. Robert Cutt is supposed to have come from England to this country previous to 1646, going first to the Barbadoes, where he married Mary Hoel, and afterward to Portsmouth, N. H. He removed thence to Kittery, Me., and died there 18 June, 1674.

2. Robert, sixth child of Robert and Mary [Hoel] Cutt, was born in 1673. He married Dorcas Hammond, 18 April, 1698, and died 24 September, 1735.

3. Mary, daughter of Robert and Dorcas [Hammond] Cutt, was born 26 December, 1698. She married, 16 May, 1722, William Whipple, afterward one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence, and died 28 February, 1783.

3a. Elizabeth, sister of Mary (3), was born 20 March, 1709. She married, 20 March, 1709, Rev. Joseph Whipple, brother of William Whipple, just named; and after his death she married for her second husband, 23 October, 1727, Rev. John Lowell (son of Ebenezer).

4. Mary, daughter of William and Mary [Cutt] Whipple, was born 13 January 1728/29, 1 September, 1748, Robert Traill, a merchant in Portsmouth, from the Orkney Isles, who remained a British subject, and left the country in November, 1775. Mary [Whipple] Traill died 3 October, 1791. Robert Traill, after the Revolution, was a collector of the revenues in the Bermudas.

5. Mary, only daughter of Robert and Mary [Whipple] Traill, baptized 24 May, 1753, married Keith Spence, of Kirkwall, Orkney, who had settled as a merchant in Portsmouth. Later he became purser of the frigate Philadelphia. Mrs. Spence died 18 January, 1824.

6. Harriet Brackett, daughter of Keith and Mary Whipple [Traill] Spence, was born 26 July, 1783; she married the Rev. Charles Lowell, 2 October, 1806, and died 30 March, 1850.

CHILDREN OF JAMES RUSSELL AND MARIA [WHITE] LOWELL.

1. Blanche, born 31 December, 1845; died 19 March, 1847.

2. Mabel, born 9 September, 1847. She married, 2 April, 1872, Edward Burnett, of Southborough, and died at Elmwood, 30 December, 1898. Their children are:

3. Rose, born 16 July, 1849; died 2 February, 1850.

4. Walter, born 22 December, 1850; died 9 June, 1852.

B. “LIST OF COPIES OF THE CONVERSATIONS TO BE GIVEN AWAY BY THE ‘DON’”

{15. R. W. Emerson, with author’s affectionate respects.
{
{16. N. Hawthorne, with author’s love.

Both these in one package, directed to Hawthorne and left at Miss Peabody’s.

17. Frank Shaw, with author’s love.

18. C. W. Storey, Jr., with happy New Year. I suppose Mr. Owen will allow me 20 copies, as he did of the Poems.

If the “Don” thinks of any more which I have forgotten, let him send them with judicious inscriptions.

19. “To Miss S. C. Lowell, with the best New Year’s wishes of her affectionate nephew, the author.” (Mr. Owen will send this up.)

20. Joseph T. Buckingham, Esq., with author’s regards and thanks.

A letter to Lowell from John Owen, dated 10 April, 1845, mentions a copy of the book which Lowell had sent with a letter to Miss Brontë.

C. A LIST OF THE WRITINGS OF JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL, ARRANGED AS NEARLY AS MAY BE IN ORDER OF PUBLICATION

Note. Titles of Poems are set in Italic type. Titles of books are in small capitals, either Roman or Italic as the books are in prose or verse. Conjectural writings have their titles enclosed in brackets.

[The titles as far as the Class Poem are of contributions to Harvardiana.]

1837.

1838.

1839.

1840.

[All the contributions this year were to the Southern Literary Messenger.]

1841.

1842.