Then followed a comparison of the stationary theatre with the vagrant one, and the brief prologue ended with some jests on the actors, as on himself:

and on Crawford:—

Story, who was to play Snug, hunted through Rome for a lion’s skin, and finally had to content himself with the skin of a tiger.

In the first representation Lowell had the part of Pyramus, in the second he was Bottom, and as he intimates made his new prologue more comprehensible by his audience. He pretended to have received a request from Mr. Black to write the prologue, and so begins:—

And that is what the second prologue consists of, with some repetition even of the jokes of the first, ending:—

An undercurrent of anxiety and affection for his father runs through the correspondence at this time, and a month later he seeks to gratify a grandfather’s feelings by devoting a whole letter, written as clearly as possible that his father might read it himself, about the sayings and doings of the two children. Some theologic questions are beginning,” he writes, “to vex her [Mabel’s] mind somewhat. She inquired of me very gravely the other day, when I said something to her about her Heavenly Father, ‘Papa, have I got a Heavenly Grandfather?’ The pictures in the churches make a great impression (and not always a pleasant one) upon her. She said to me one day: ‘O my dear papa, I love you so very much, because you take care of me; and I love mamma very much because she takes care of me; and I love Mary very much because she takes care of me; and I love Heavenly Father because he takes care of me; and I love the Madonna very much because she takes care of me; and I love the angels because they take care of me; and I love that one with the swords stuck into her, and that other one with the stick.’ These last were no doubt pictures she had seen somewhere. During Carnival, we did not let her go to the Corso much, because there was so much throwing of confetti, which are small seeds or pellets of clay about as large as peas, coated with plaster of Paris. However, she saw the edges of the great stream, here and there, as it overflowed into the side streets, and talked a great deal to Faustina about Pulcinelli and Pagliacci. She threatened rather sharply to pay back ‘Mister Pulcinello’ (as she always respectfully called him when she spoke of him in English) in his own coin, if he threw any confetti, or oftener, nasty confetti, at her. One day she was walking with me through the Piazza di Spagna, with half a roll in her hand, when she saw one of the lacqueys of the S. P. Q. R. in his queer costume. She instantly set him down for a Pulcinello, and I had much ado to hinder her from hurling the fragment of her roll at him, much as she once threw a dry bun at somebody else who shall be nameless. She is making great progress in Italian under the tuition of Dinda and Amelia, two nice little girls, daughters of our Padrone. One of the great events in her day is always the pudding—in trattoria Italian il budino. As soon as the great tin stufa has safely made its descent from the head of the facchino to the floor, she begins a dance around it, shouting in a voice loud enough to be heard as far as the Trinità dei Monti, ‘O Faustina, ditemi! C’è un puddino oggi?’ And if it turn out that there be only a pie, which is a forbidden dolce to her, she forthwith drops her voice to its lowest key and growls—‘Mi dispiace molto, mo-o-lto, Faustina; pudino non c’è: ce sono solamente pasticcie.’ Sometimes I have heard her add with a good deal of dignity, ‘Dite al cuoco che mi dispiace molto.’ A day or two ago, when she saw a plum-pudding come upon the table, she could not contain herself, but, springing up into her chair (for she can never express satisfaction without using her legs—her intoxications seeming to take direction the reverse of common), she began dancing and waving her arms quite like a Bacchanal, at the same time singing—

I offer this to Jemmy to translate, as an Italian exercise, for his paper. If it be not equal to Dante, upon my word I think it quite up to a good deal of Tasso, and much more to the point than nine tenths of Petrarca. Improvisations are seldom put to the test of being written down, but this bears it very well. The tender padrino—Dear little Father—was an adroit bribe, which got her a third piece of pudding by the unanimous vote of our household senate. Ask Charlie to read over the muddy stuff which Byron thought it necessary to pump up about St. Peter’s, etc., in ‘Childe Harold,’ and say if he do not agree with me that his lordship would have made a better hand of it if he had devoted himself to sincerities like this?...

“As for Walter, he grows and thrives finely. He can say A, B, C, D, or something considerably like it—nearer, in fact, a good deal, than the first four letters of the Chinese alphabet would be. He has done, during the last week, what I have challenged many older persons to do, namely, cut a double tooth. I doubt if a cabinet minister in Europe can say the same of himself. He has grown very fond of his papa, and sometimes crawls to my door of a morning before I am out of bed, and then, getting upon his feet, knocks and calls ‘Papa! papa!’ laying the accent very strongly on the first syllable. If he hears my voice, he immediately springs up in Mary’s lap, and begins shouting lustily for me. He is the fairest boy that ever was seen, and has the bluest eyes, and is the baldest person in Rome except two middle-aged Englishmen, who, you know, have a great knack that way.... In a word, he is one of that countless number of extraordinary boys out of which the world contrives afterward to make such ordinary men. I think him rather intelligent—but, as the picture dealers say, chi sa? As he is mine, I shall do rather as the picture-buyers, and call what I have got by any name I please. One cannot say definitely so early. It is hard to tell of a green shoot just worming out of the ground whether it will be an oak or an onion—they all look much alike at first.”

Not an oak, but a plant and flower of light, Lowell might shortly have said, for this is the last reference in life to the child suddenly stricken down and left behind in a Roman grave by the mourning parents, when, on the 29th of April, they went away from Rome to Naples with the one child of their four who lived to them. On the 13th of the month Lowell wrote to his eldest sister: “We are now within a fortnight of bidding farewell to what I am now forced to call dear old Rome. In spite of its occupation by an army of ten thousand French soldiers, in spite of its invasion by that more terrible force, the column of English travellers, in spite of the eternal drumming and bugling and sentinelling in the streets, and the crowding of that insular Bull—qui semper habet fœnum in cornu—there is an insensible charm about the place which grows upon you from hour to hour. There must be few cities where one can command such absolute solitude as here. One cannot expect it, to be sure, in the Colosseum by moonlight, for thither the English go by carriage loads to be lonely with a footman in livery behind them, and to quote Byron’s stuff out of Murray’s Guide; there perch the French in voluble flocks, under the necessity (more painful to them than to any other people) of being poetical—chattering Mon Dieu! qu’un joli effet! But an hour’s walk will take one out into the Campagna, where you will look across the motionless heave of the solitude dotted here and there with lazy cattle to the double wall of mountain, the nearest opaline with change of light and shadow, the farther Parian with snow that only grows whiter when the cloud shadows melt across it—the air overhead rippling with larks too countless to be watched, and the turf around you glowing with strange flowers, each a wonder, yet so numberless that you would as soon think of gathering a nosegay of grass blades. On Easter Sunday I spent an incomparable day at the Fountain of Egeria, stared at sullenly, now and then, by one of those great gray Campagna bulls, but totally safe from the English variety which had gone to get broken ribs at St. Peter’s. The show-box unholiness of Holy Week is at last well over. The best part of it was that on Holy Thursday all the Vatican was open at once—fifteen miles of incomparable art. For me the Pope washed perfumed feet, and the Cardinal Penitentiary wielded his long rod in vain. I dislike such spectacles naturally, and saw no reason why I should undergo every conceivable sort of discomfort and annoyance for the sake of another discomfort or annoyance at the end....

“The finest show I have seen in Rome is the illumination of St. Peter’s. Just after sunset I saw from the head of the scalinata, the little points of light creeping down from the cross and lantern (trickling, as it were) over the dome. Then I walked over to the Piazza di San Pietro, and the first glimpse I caught of it again was from the Ponte Sant’ Angelo. I could not have believed it would have been so beautiful. There was no time or space to pause here. Foot passengers crowding hither and thither as they heard the shout of Avanti! from the coachmen behind—dragoon-horses getting unmanageable just where there were most women to be run over—and all the while the dome drawing all eyes and thoughts the wrong way, made a hubbub to be got out of as soon as possible. Five minutes more of starting and dodging, and we were in the piazza. You have seen it and know how it seems, as if the setting sun had lodged upon the horizon and then burnt out, the fire still clinging to its golden ribs as they stand out against the evening sky. You know how, as you come nearer, you can see the soft travertine of the façade suffused with a tremulous golden gloom like the innermost shrine of a water-lily. And then the change comes as if the wind had suddenly fanned what was embers before into flame. If you could see one sunset in a lifetime and were obliged to travel four thousand miles to see it, it would give you a similar sensation; but an everyday sunset does not, for we take the gifts of God as a matter of course.

“After wondering long enough in the piazza, I went back to the Pincio (or rather the Trinità dei Monti) and watched it for an hour longer. I did not wish to see it go out. To me it seemed better to go home with the consciousness that it was still throbbing, as if I could make myself believe that there was a kind of permanence in it, and that I should see it there again some happy evening. Before leaving it, I went away and came back several times, and at every return it was a new miracle—the more miraculous for being a human piece of fairy work.

“Last night there was another wonder, the Girandola, which we saw excellently well from the windows of the American legation. Close behind me, by the way, stood Silvio Pellico (a Jesuit now), a little withered old man in spectacles, looking so very dry that I could scarce believe he had ever been shut up in a damp dungeon in his life. This was (I mean the Girandola) the most brilliant and at the same time tasteful display of fireworks I ever saw. I had no idea that so much powder could be burned to so good purpose. For the first time in my life I saw rockets that seemed endowed with life and intelligence. They might have been thought filled with the same vivacity and enjoyment so characteristic of the people. Our rockets at home seem business-like in comparison. They accomplish immense heights in a steady straight-forward way, explode as a matter of course, and then the stick hurries back to go about its terrestrial affairs again. And yet why should I malign those beautiful slow curves of fire, that I have watched with Charlie and Jemmie from Simonds’s Hill, and which I would rather see again than twenty Girandolas? If Michelangelo had designed our fireworks, and if it did not by some fatal coincidence always rain on the evening of 4th July, doubtless they would be better.”

Something of the total impression made upon Lowell in this first visit to Rome may be seen in the fragment of a letter to Mr. John Holmes, written near the end of his stay:—

“After all, this is a wonderful place. One feels disappointed at first, everything looks so modern. But as the mind, taking in ruin after ruin, gradually reconstructs for itself the grandeur and the glory, of which these city-like masses are but the splinters sprinkled here and there by the fall of the enormous fabric, and conceives the spiritual which has outlived that temporal domination, and even surpassed it, laying its foundations deeper than the reach of earthquake or Gaul, and conquering worlds beyond the ken of the Roman eagles in their proudest flight, a feeling of the sublime, vague and vast, takes the place of the first hurried curiosity and interest. Surely the American (and I feel myself more intensely American every day) is last of all at home among ruins—but he is at home in Rome. I cannot help believing that in some respects we represent more truly the old Roman Power and sentiment than any other people. Our art, our literature, are, as theirs, in some sort exotics; but our genius for politics, for law, and, above all, for colonization, our instinct for aggrandizement and for trade, are all Roman. I believe we are laying the basis of a more enduring power and prosperity, and that we shall not pass away till we have stamped ourselves upon the whole western hemisphere so deeply, so nobly, that if, in the far-away future, some Gibbon shall muse among our ruins, the history of our Decline and Fall shall be more mournful and more epic than that of the huge Empire amid the dust of whose once world-shaking heart these feelings so often come upon me.”

The last week before leaving Rome was spent in an excursion with Story to Subiaco, as related at length in “Leaves from my Journal in Italy.” On their way to Naples the Lowells made a halt at Terracina, from which place Lowell wrote to Robert Carter: “Here I am, with a magnificent cliff opposite my window crowned by twelve arches of what is called the Palace of Theodoric. I have just come in from seeing the Cathedral, the dirtiest church I have seen in Italy (with a very picturesque old Campanile, however), and the remains of the old Roman port, which astonished me by their size even after all I had seen of Roman hugeness. The port is now filled with soil, and there is a fine orange garden where vessels used to lie. Terracina is nothing like what I expected to see. The inn (or ‘Grand’ Albergo, as it is called) is one of the least cutthroat looking places I ever saw. It is quite out of the town, between the great cliff and the sea. Behind it, on the beach, the scene is quite Neapolitan—forty or fifty bare-legged fishermen are drawing a great seine out of the water, and forty or fifty dirty, laughing, ragged, happily-wretched children gather round you and beg for caccose or cecco, by which they mean qualche cosa. The women sit round the doors, nasty and contented, urging on their offspring in their professional career. They are the most obstinate beggars I have seen yet. In Rome the waving of the two first fingers of the hand and a decided non c’è is generally sufficient, but here I tried every expedient in vain. The prickly pear grows bloatedly in all the ledges of the cliff, an olive orchard climbs half-way up the back of it where the hill is less steep, and farther to the left there are tall palms in a convent garden, but I cannot see them.

“The drive over the Pontine marshes is for more than twenty miles a perfectly straight, smooth avenue, between double rows of elms. I had been told it was very dull, but did not find it so; for there were mountains on one side of us, cultivated, or cattle and horse-covered fields or woods on the other, and the birds sang and the sun shone all the way. It seemed like the approach to some prince’s pleasure-house.... On the whole, the result of my experience thus far is that I am glad that I came abroad, though the knowledge one acquires must rust for want of use in a great measure at home. To be sure, one’s political ideas are also somewhat modified—I don’t mean retrograded.”

The progress of the travellers is but briefly recorded after this. They were in Naples early in May, and thence they appear to have made their way to Venice, and to have spent the summer in leisurely travel through the Italian lakes, Switzerland, Germany, Provence, and France, reaching England in the early autumn. Here they saw London, Oxford, and Cambridge. “We have been also,” Lowell wrote to his father, “at Ely, where the cathedral is one of the most interesting I have seen. I know nothing for which I am more thankful than the opportunity I have had of seeing fine buildings. I think they give me a more absolute pleasure than anything except fine natural scenery. Perhaps I should not except even this, for the sense that it is a triumph of the brain and hand of man certainly heightens the delight we feel in them. I think that Ely, more than anything else, turned the scale and induced us to stay a month longer.” From London, Lowell made an excursion with Kenyon to Bath to see Landor, and thirty-six years later he jotted down some of the impressions he then received of the man, whose writings he had long admired.[94]

A trip followed through England and into Scotland and Wales, which took in Peterborough, Lincoln, York, Ripon, Fountains Abbey, Durham, Edinburgh, and the haunts of Scott, the Scottish and English lakes, and then the Lowells took steamer from Liverpool, 30 October, 1852.

CHAPTER VIII

AN END AND A BEGINNING

1852-1857

Clough has left a little picture of the interior of Elmwood: “Yesterday I had a walk with James Lowell to a very pretty spot, Beaver Brook. Then I dined with him, his wife, and his father, a fine old minister who is stone deaf, but talks to you. He began by saying that he was born an Englishman, i. e. before the end of the Revolution. Then he went on to say, ‘I have stood as near to George III. as to you now;’ ‘I saw Napoleon crowned Emperor;’ then, ‘Old men are apt to be garrulous, especially about themselves;’ ‘I saw the present Sultan ride through Constantinople on assuming the throne;’ and so on,—all in a strong clear voice, and in perfect sentences, which you saw him making beforehand. And all one could do was to bow and look expressive, for he could only just hear when his son got up and shouted in his ear.”[95] Lowell gave briefly his estimate of Clough’s genius when he wrote a few weeks later to Mr. Briggs: “I wish to write a review of his ‘Bothie,’ to serve him in event of a new edition. It is one of the most charming books ever written,—to my thinking quite as much by itself as the ‘Vicar of Wakefield.’”

With his European experience behind him Lowell was eager to plunge into literature, and his intention at first was to try his hand at fiction, possibly turning his experience to account somewhat after the manner of his neighbor’s “Hyperion.” At any rate, Longfellow notes in his diary under date of 29 November, 1852: “Met Lowell in the street and brought him home to smoke a pipe. He had been to the bookseller’s to buy a blank book to begin a Novel, on the writing of which his mind is bent. He seems rather sad and says he does not take an interest in anything. This is the reaction after the excitement of foreign travel. Lowell will write a capital novel, and when he gets warm in the harness will feel happier;” and a fortnight later he makes the entry: “Lowell came in. He has begun his novel.”

It is to be suspected that he never went far in the attempt. A dozen years later, when Mr. Fields wanted him to write a novel for the Atlantic Monthly, he made the summary answer: “I can’t write one nor conceive how any one else can.” Yet he could not have abandoned the trial immediately, for in June he was writing to Briggs: “I have got so far as to have written the first chapter of a prose book,—a sort of New England autobiography, which may turn out well.”[96]

Meanwhile, he was met on his arrival in America with a piece of literary news which was welcome for its own sake and because it promised an outlet for his productions. His friend Briggs as editor-in-chief, with G. W. Curtis and Parke Godwin for assistants, was just about launching a new magazine in New York, which was likely to come nearer fulfilling the ideal Lowell had long cherished than anything thus far issued in America. Putnam’s Monthly had behind it an active publishing house, whose head, Mr. G. P. Putnam, had that indefinable quality which makes a publisher, if not an author himself, a genuine appreciator of good literature, and a man whose friendship with authors rested on a basis which was social as well as commercial. He had shown his sagacity and business insight by taking up the writings of Washington Irving when that author was in neglect, and winning a substantial success with them. He cared for the books he published and listened willingly to Mr. Briggs when that gentleman, who had been engaged in many editorial enterprises, argued that the time was ripe for a literary monthly which should stand for American literature of the best sort, and should at the same time concern itself with public affairs and furnish also that miscellaneous entertainment of narrative and description for which the American public showed a liking. Harper’s New Monthly Magazine had been started a couple of years before, but it was almost wholly a reprint of English current literature, and even its cover was a copy of Bentley’s. It had, however, struck a popular taste, and its success made other publishers jealous, while its easy use of foreign matter made the men of letters angry.

The prospectus of Putnam’s Monthly, in which the fact that it was to be “an entirely original work” was emphasized, announced that it was “intended to combine the more various and amusing characteristics of a popular magazine with the higher and graver qualities of a quarterly review,” and that when a subject needed illustrations or pictorial examples, such illustrations would occasionally be given. The rate of payment was fair for the time: poetry had no fixed rates, but Lowell received fifty dollars for a poem of two hundred and fifty lines or so, and prose was paid at the rate of three dollars a page. Hawthorne and Emerson were among those who promised their work, though neither seems to have contributed, but Longfellow printed several poems. The articles and poems were all unsigned. The early numbers gave good promise, and Curtis, with his “Prue and I” papers gave a distinction of lightness and added the flavor which every literary magazine covets but can rarely command. The first number, Briggs declared with elation, had run up to twenty thousand copies, and the second number had one of those articles, “Have we a Bourbon among us?” which are the joy of the magazine editor for the buzz which they create in the reading community. But the high hopes with which Putnam’s started out somehow faded. There were exceptionally good poems and the general average of writing was high, but the magazine soon satisfied curiosity without creating a demand, and the financial embarrassment of the publisher after two years compelled a transfer of the publishing interest which was followed by a steady decline in quality.

Meanwhile, Mr. Briggs looked eagerly to Lowell for help, and for his first number received the poem “The Fountain of Youth,” which had been lying in the poet’s portfolio for three years. He suggested that Lowell should publish “The Nooning” as a serial. This was not to be, but whether from this suggestion or not, Lowell suddenly took it into his head to start a serio-comic poem in Alexandrines, under the heading “Our Own, his Wanderings and Personal Adventures,” in which he intended to personate a correspondent of the magazine, who should travel in Europe, and employ his nonsense and satire on men and things. He began leisurely enough, heading his page with a Greek, a Latin, and an English motto, each cleverly hinting at the plan and the name of the piece. The Latin “Quæ regio in terris Nostri non plena laboris?” was Englished in

Then he makes a doggerel verse under Digression A which slyly imitates Spenser’s verse table-of-contents, and so with Digressions, Invocation, and Progression he saunters carelessly along. “The last few days,” he writes to Briggs, 17 February, 1853, “I have worked in earnest. I wrote one hundred and fifty lines yesterday, and it is thought funny by the constituency in my little Buncombe here. I have hopes that it will be the best thing I have done in the satiric way after I once get fairly agoing. I am thus far taking the run back for the jump. I have enlarged my plan and, if you like it, can make it run through several numbers. It is cruel, impudent,—sassy, I meant to write. Some parts of it I have flavored slightly with Yankee,—but not in dialect. I wish to make it something more than ephemeral, and shall put more thinking into it as I go along. My idea for it is a glass of punch, sweetness, sourness, spirit, and a dash of that Chinese herb favorable to meditation.”

There were three numbers only published of “Our Own,” though the last carried the legend “To be continued” at its foot. The perplexed editor hardly knew how to answer Lowell’s demand for criticism. He himself was immensely entertained, he averred, but nobody else was; although he had heard of one or two, and Lowell added the names of two or three more, it was clear to Mr. Briggs that the verses did not take, and he grew petulant over the stupidity of the public. Lowell’s own ardor cooled. The style of composition was indeed to real writing what the pun is to real wit. In the heat of firing off these fire-crackers, ever so much execution seems to be done, but the laugh that follows is not repeated, and the cleverness and point seem dulled when the bristling jests crowd each other, giving no relief to each.

Lowell could not quite agree with Briggs in the deference which the latter was disposed to pay to the expressions of the public upon the contents of his magazine: “I doubt if your magazine,” he writes, “will become really popular if you edit it for the mob. Nothing is more certain than that popularity goes downward and not up (I mean permanent popularity), and it is what the few like now that the many have got to like by and by. Now don’t turn the tables on me and say that,—not the very few. I have pretty much given up the notion that I can be popular either upward or downward, and what I say has no reference to myself. I wish I could be. But it strikes me that you want as much variety as possible. It is not merely necessary that the matter should be good, but that it should be individual.”

A good many years afterward when Lowell was making up a volume of poems, he looked again at “Our Own” to see if it was worth preserving, and out of the whole six hundred lines he saved only the verses now headed “Fragments of an Unfinished Poem” and the two charming stanzas “Aladdin.”[97] The insertion of this little poem in the midst of his nonsense indicates that if Lowell had found sufficient encouragement he might, especially after reaching Europe in his plan, have worked off the surplusage of high spirits and thrown into his rambling discourse both caustic satire and genial humor.

A more satisfactory and successful contribution which was enthusiastically received by the editor was “A Moosehead Journal,” which was in effect a journal, sent home to his wife, of an excursion made by Lowell in the summer of 1853 with his nephew Charles; and in the spring of 1854 appeared in two parts the well-known sketch of “Cambridge Thirty Years Ago,” under the title, “Fireside Travels.” The paper seems to have grown out of an unused sketch of Allston which Lowell had begun for Putnam’s in September, 1853. “What I have written (or part of it),” he says to the editor, “would make a unique article for your magazine, if the other thing is given up. It is a sketch of Cambridge as it was twenty-five years ago, and is done as nobody but I could do it, for nobody knows the old town so well. I mean one of these days to draw a Commencement as it used to be.” Lowell does not appear to have contributed to Putnam’s after December, 1854, when his portrait, an engraving by Hall after Page’s painting, served as frontispiece to the number, being one of a series of portraits of contributors to the magazine.

Meanwhile, when Putnam’s was at the top of its brief tide, another attempt at a good literary magazine was made in Boston. The extraordinary success of “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” had emboldened its publisher, Mr. John P. Jewett, to undertake what its projector, Mr. F. H. Underwood, called a “Literary and Anti-Slavery Magazine.” It was the intention to issue the first number in January, 1854, and to use the great reputation of Mrs. Stowe to float it by printing a new novel by her. Mr. Underwood[98] was particularly desirous of securing Lowell’s aid, especially as he esteemed his poetry quite the best to be had in America, and he was elated at receiving from him the poem “The Oriole’s Nest,” afterward called simply “The Nest.” But the design which had been germinating for two or three years was suddenly brought to naught by the failure of the luckless publishers, whose success with “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” seems to have been thrust upon them, rather than to have been due to their business ability. So a fortnight after sending his poem, Lowell was forced to write the disconcerted editor: “I cannot help writing a word to say how truly sorry I was to hear of the blowing up of your magazine. But it is not so irreparable as if it had been a powder-magazine, though perhaps all the harder to be borne because it was only in posse and not in esse. The explosion of one of those Castles in Spain sometimes sprinkles dust on all the rest of our lives, but I hope you are of better heart, and will rather look upon the affair as a burning of your ships which makes victory the more imperative. Although I could prove by a syllogism in barbara that you are no worse off than you were before, I know very well that you are, for if it be bad to lose mere coin, it is still worse to lose hope, which is the mint in which most gold is manufactured.

“But, after all, is it a hopeless case? Consider yourself to be in the position of all the world before the Mansion of our Uncle Thomas (as I suppose we must call it now, it has grown so respectable) was published, and never to have heard of this Mr. Jew-wit. I think he ought to be—that something ought to be done for him: but for that matter nearly all booksellers stand in the same condemnation. There are as good fish in that buccaneering sea of Bibliopoly as ever were caught, and if one of them has broken away from your harpoon, I hope the next may prove a downright kraaken, on whom, if needful, you can pitch your tent and live.

“Don’t think that I am trifling with you. God knows any jests of mine would be of a bitter sort just now; but I know that it is a good thing for a man to be made to look at his misfortune till it assumes its true relations to things about it. So don’t think me intrusive if I nudge your elbow among the rest.”

A few weeks after the return of the Lowells to America, Longfellow took Clough on a walk to Elmwood. “Lowell,” he says, “we found musing before his fire in his study. His wife came in, slender and pale as a lily.” In reading “A Year’s Life” one is struck by the frequency with which the shadow of death falls across the page. It is true that when he wrote the poems, when indeed he fell in with Maria White, Lowell was struggling out of an atmosphere which was full of damp mist, and the image of death naturally rose constantly before him. Yet it remains that from the beginning of his passion he associated this love with the idea of death. So frail, so almost ethereal was the woman who came thus into his life, that from the first he was constantly sheltering her from the cold blast. The solicitude deepened his passion; it accustomed him at the same time to the idea of transitoriness in the life he led. It is entirely possible, nay, very probable, that this spiritually-bodied girl was permitted to develop into a gracious womanhood through the very fact of her marriage and her motherhood: Lowell’s own mood during the nine years of married life was, as we have seen, often irrepressibly gay and sanguine, and after the death of each of their children the two seemed to spring back into a wholesome delight in life. Still, the fear could never have long been out of their minds, and, after Walter died in Rome, the mother seems steadily to have drooped. When Lowell sent “The Nest” to Underwood, he speaks of it as an old poem: “Perhaps,” he says, “it seems better to me than it deserves, for an intense meaning has been added to it.” The meaning had then indeed been deepened, but when it was written, there was more than remote prophecy in the lines—

The year that passed after the return from Europe saw Mrs. Lowell declining in strength, though it was not till September, 1853, that his letters betray Lowell’s deepening anxiety, and it was not till the end of the month that he fully realized the progress disease had made. Mrs. Lowell died 27 October, and Lowell was left alone with his little daughter. The visionary faculty, which all his life had been what might almost be called another sense, came now to his help and for awhile he lived as if the companion of thirteen years, though shut out from his daily sight, visited him in the solitude and silence of the night. “I have the most beautiful dreams,” he writes, “and never as if any change had come to us. Once I saw her sitting with Walter on her knee, and she said to me, ‘See what a fine strong boy he is grown.’ And one night as I was lying awake and straining my eyes through the gloom, and the palpable darkness was surging and gathering and dispersing as it will, I suddenly saw far, far off a crescent of angels standing and shining silently. But oh! it is a million times better to have had her and lost her, than to have had and kept any other woman I ever saw.”

It had given both husband and wife a great pleasure to see one and another of Mrs. Lowell’s poems printed during the last year in Putnam’s Monthly. Mr. Briggs, with his affectionate regard for both, was eager to print the verses as they were sent him, and reported all the agreeable words that came to him respecting the poems. The latest to be printed was one on Avignon, in which the poet kept turning back from the historic and spectacular sights to some oleanders which stood by her window. “How beautiful it was,” Lowell wrote to Briggs, “and how fitting for the last. I am going to print them all—but not publish them yet—she did not wish it. I shall give a copy, with a calotype from a drawing which Cheney is to make from Page’s picture, to all her friends.”

It was a year and more before the volume was printed, bearing the title “The Poems of Maria Lowell,” and inscribed to Mrs. Story, Mrs. Putnam, and Mrs. Shaw, three friends of whose loving appreciation Lowell had had many assurances. There are only twenty poems in the volume. Most had been printed before, one, “The Morning-Glory,” in Lowell’s own collection. None of her translations were included. One looks naturally in such a volume rather for intimations of the writer’s character, and for touches of personal feeling, than for poetic art. Mrs. Lowell herself plainly had but a humble conceit of her poetic gift, and it does not appear that poetry was an abundant resource with her. But art there is of no mean order in this little book. It is a delicate instrument on which she plays; there are not many stops, but there is a vibrant tone which thrills the ear. Tenderness indeed is the prevailing note, but in one poem, “Africa,” there is a massiveness of structure, and a sonorous dignity of measure which appeal powerfully to the imagination. The poems have, here and there, an autobiographic value. One written in Rome, shortly after the travellers had reached that city and the dream of childhood had come true, ended with the verses:—

There are four sonnets in which her love for her husband glows with a deep, steady passion, one of them written doubtless in the solemn days near the end, in the spirit recorded by Lowell when he wrote to Briggs after her death: “She promised to be with me if that were possible.”

What most impresses the reader who takes all these poems at a sitting is the reserve, the just balance of sentiment which controls them. Passion is here, but it is not stormy, and love and tenderness, but they are not feeble and tearful. Depth of feeling and strength of character lie open to view in the firm lines, and the fine light and shade of the verse come incontrovertibly from a nature evenly poised, whose companionship must have been to Lowell that of a kindred spirit, capable indeed of guiding and not merely of seconding his resolves.

The frontispiece to the volume, which is here reproduced, was a crystallotype of a drawing by Cheney after Page’s portrait. “It is like,” Lowell wrote at the time, “as far as there can be any likeness made of a face so full of spiritual beauty, and in which so much of the charm was subterficial.” He tried to convey to a friend, with whom his association was purely literary, some notion of her when he wrote: “All that was written of Lady Digby, all that Taylor said of the Countess of Carbery and Donne of Elizabeth Drury—belongs as well to her, she was so beautiful and good. She was born 8th July, 1821, married 26th December, 1844, and went home 27th October, 1853. ‘The Pilgrim they laid in a large upper chamber whose windows opened toward the sunrising: and the name of the chamber was Peace.’”

This was written more than a year after the event. He made use of the same allusion just after his wife’s death, when writing to his friend Briggs, but added mournfully that he himself was not in that chamber. Indeed, in the first months of his desolation he was in a most unhappy state, and endured a loneliness from which now and then an uncontrollably passionate cry would be uttered. His father was perfectly deaf and often alarmingly excitable, and his sister Rebecca eccentric to a degree which made her preserve for days an absolute silence. He would rush out into the world, and there showed an artificial gayety which bewildered his friends, only to come back to despise himself. “I know perfectly well,” he wrote to his most intimate friend, “that my nature is naturally joyous and susceptible of all happy impressions; but that is the very reason I am wretched. I am afraid of myself. I dread the world and its temptations, for I do long to keep myself pure enough to satisfy her who was better than all I can say of her. I often troubled her while she was here, but I cannot bear to now that she is in entire felicity.” He was, as he afterward said of himself, in great agony of mind, and he had to force himself into those laborious hours which one instinctively feels contain a wise restorative.

He was, in a measure, undergoing solitary confinement. He sat in his lonely study, or walked up and down, pencilling sentences on the wall as if he were really a prisoner, and finding a strange consolation in repeating the Service for the Dead, which he had learned by heart. “I remember,” he wrote long after,[99] “the ugly fancy I had sometimes that I was another person, and used to hesitate at the door when I came back from my late night walks, lest I should find the real owner of the room sitting in my chair before the fire. A well-nigh hermit life I had led till then.” There were but few who could approach his real self in those days, but there came from Longfellow a gentle word of consolation in his poem “The Two Angels,” written on the coincidence of the birth of his own daughter and the death of Mrs. Lowell.

Meanwhile, his letters, even when disclosing his misery, contained happy references to his sturdy, affectionate child. True, all the losses he had suffered seemed now to be but the messengers of a final disaster. “I have only one lamb left of four,” he wrote to an occasional correspondent, “and think I hear the foot of the inexorable wolf if a leaf rustle;” but as the days went by this sensitiveness subsided. He was fortunate in having for her a most admirable governess, and he found the child’s companionship an unfailing joy. “I said as I sat down to dinner,” he writes in one of his letters; “‘This is a rare day, I have positively had an idea.’ Not knowing the meaning of ‘idea,’ and I being in the habit of telling her (when she is hypt, no rare thing) that she has some disease to which I give a very hard name,—she thought I was joking, and said, ‘Nonsense, papa, you haven’t got an idea,’—evidently thinking it some terrible complaint. ‘Why, shouldn’t you like a papa that had ideas?’ She threw her arms round my neck and said: ‘You dear papa! you’re just the kind of papa that I love!’” “Mabel,” he writes again, “has just begun to have ‘Robinson Crusoe’ read to her. Think of that and burst with envy! What have you and I left in life like that? She has already arranged a coronet of feathers, and proposes to play Indian Chief in future. Her great part lately has been the Great Wild Goat of the Parlor,—produced every evening with unbounded applause, especially from the chief actor. With a pair of newspaper horns she chases her father (who knows what it is to be tossed on the horns of the newspapers), qualifying his too excessive terrors with a kiss at last to show that it is really not real, but only play.... She has been in the habit of hearing her grandfather always say, ‘If Providence permit,’ of course not knowing what it meant. But one day, having made an uncommonly successful slide, she turned triumphantly to her aunt and cried, ‘There, that time I went like Providence permit.’ The doctor ordered her a blanket bath. She had already tried one and said, ‘If you please, papa, I had rather not.’ ‘But, darling, most people like them very much.’ ‘Well, papa, I don’t; people have different tastes you know. I’ve often noticed that everybody has a different mind.’”

Added to the need of wresting his mind from the despondency of grief was the pecuniary pressure. He had an income at this time from such little property as he possessed of six hundred dollars a year, and that plainly would not suffice. So he shook his portfolio, and even began writing new poems which he sent to his friend Briggs for Putnam’s, and he set about working over the letters he had written in Italy, publishing them in Graham’s Magazine, under the title “Leaves from my Italian Journal.” It was easier to do such mechanical work as this, and he began to speculate on the possibility of editing Shakespeare, and meditated a life of Dean Swift. He did during 1854 edit Marvell for the series of British Poets which his friend Professor Child was preparing for Little, Brown & Co., expending a good deal of loving care on the text, and editing Henry Rogers’s brief memoir by omissions, illustrations from Marvell’s writings, and a slight addition. He wrote also at this time, for use in the same series, the brief sketch of Keats which afterward he placed with his collected essays. As an introduction to Keats’s poems, it was designedly more biographical than critical, and did little more than set forth in a lively fashion the facts gathered by Milnes. When one considers Lowell’s early appreciation of Keats, it seems a little singular that he should have contented himself with so slight an expression.

Lowell spent the last week of June, 1854, at Newport, R. I., on a visit to the Nortons, and then went for the summer to Beverly, chiefly to be near his sister, Mrs. Charles Lowell. At this time the north shore of Massachusetts Bay had all the charm of rock and beach which it now has, with a pristine simplicity of life which it has lost. To-day the visitor drives through the woods near Beverly by well-kept roads, meeting at every turn other carriages and pleasure parties. Then, the woods were as beautiful, but had unbroken solitude. “At Newport,” Lowell wrote to Miss Norton, “you have no woods, and ours are so grand and deep and unconverted! They have those long pauses of conscious silence that are so fine, as if the spirit that inhabits them were hiding from you and holding its breath,—and then all the leaves stir again, and the pines cheat the rocks with their mock surf, and that invisible bird that haunts such solitudes calls once and is answered, and then silence again.”

A letter to Mr. Norton, dated 14 August, 1854, hints at the restful character of this seaside sojourn. “This is an outlying dependency of the Castle of Indolence, and even more lazy,—in proportion as the circulation is more languid at the extremities. By dint of counting on my fingers, and with the aid of an old newspaper and an almanac, I have approximated, I believe, to the true date of your world out there, and that seems to me quite a sufficient mental achievement for one morning. The chief food of the people here is Lotus. It is cunning to take various shapes,—sometimes fish, sometimes flesh, fowl, eggs, or what not,—but is always Lotus. It does not make us forget, only Memory is no longer recollection, it is passive, not active, and mixes real with feigned things, just as in perfectly still pools the images of clouds filter down through the transparent water and make one perspective with the matter-of-fact weeds at the bottom. I feel as if I had sunk in a diving-bell provisioned and aired for three months, and knew not of storm or calm, or of the great keels, loaded, perhaps, with fate, that sigh hoarsely overhead toward their appointed haven....

“What do I do? Tarry at Jericho chiefly. Also I row and fish, and have learned to understand the life of a shore fisherman thoroughly. Sometimes I get my dinner with my lines,—a rare fate for a poet. Sometimes I watch the net result when the tritons draw their seine. Also I grow brown, and have twice lost and renewed the skin of my hands and, alas, my nose, Also I know what hunger is and, reversing the Wordsworthian sheep, am one feeding like forty.”

He went on one or two short cruises and enjoyed the genuine country life with its salt flavor, but was back at Elmwood in the fall. The year had found some intimate expression in his verse, as well as the more objective poems like “Pictures from Appledore,” suggested in part it may be by one of his summer cruises, though the last section was written four years before. Mr. Stillman, who made his acquaintance at this time, when he was foraging for The Crayon, the new literary and art journal which his enthusiasm had projected, speaks warmly of the princely courtesy with which Lowell received him. “Out of the depth of the shadow over his life,” he writes,[100] “in the solitude of his study, with nothing but associations of his wrecked happiness permitted around him, the kindly sympathy with a new aspiration wakened him to a momentary gaiety, his humor flashed out irrepressible, and his large heart turned its warmest side to the new friend, who came only to make new calls on his benevolence; that is, to give him another opportunity to bestow himself on others.” On his part, Lowell welcomed heartily this ingenuous lover of art and letters. They took long walks together over the country Lowell knew so well, to Beaver Brook, the Waverley Oaks, and the Waltham hills. “You made me fifteen years younger,” he wrote, “while you stayed. When a man gets to my age, enthusiasms don’t often knock at the door of his garret. I am all the more charmed with them when they come. A youth full of such pure intensity of hope and faith and purpose, what is he but the breath of a resurrection-trumpet to stiffened old fellows, bidding us up out of our clay and earth if we would not be too late?”

The poems which register the tranquillity of a return to common life, like “The Windharp” and “Auf Wiedersehen,” are tremulous with the emotion which he could bear to express. Indeed, when Lowell came to print the former of these poems he omitted one stanza, possibly as going farther than he cared to with his contemporaneous public. In the letter last quoted, he sent it to Mr. Stillman.