The limitations of his theme and measure forbid more than a hint at this vocation of the poet, but it happens that we have a somewhat more explicit statement of the same general idea in a prose form. A very few weeks after the revelation referred to in the letter to Dr. Loring, too soon certainly for it to have faded from his mind, he sat down to write a paper on “The Plays of Thomas Middleton,” and the introductory passages contain what may fairly be taken as snatches from that music of the spheres which he seems suddenly to have overheard.

“Poets are the forerunners and prophets of changes in the moral world. Driven, by their finer nature, to search into and reverently contemplate the universal laws of soul, they find some fragments of the broken tables of God’s law, and interpret it, half conscious of its mighty import. While philosophers are wrangling, and politicians playing at snapdragon with the destinies of millions, the poet, in the silent deeps of his soul, listens to those mysterious pulses which, from one central heart, send life and beauty through the finest veins of the universe, and utters truths to be sneered at, perchance, by contemporaries, but which become religion to posterity....

“The dreams of poets are morning-dreams, coming to them in the early dawn and day-breaking of great truths, and are surely fulfilled at last. They repeat them, as children do, and all Christendom, if it be not too busy with quarrelling about the meaning of creeds which have no meaning at all, listens with a shrug of the shoulders and a smile of pitying incredulity: for reformers are always madmen in their own age, and infallible saints in the next.”

In such rhetorical terms did Lowell, all aflame himself with poetic zeal, try to outline the divine call of the poet, and the “Conversations” reënforce a doctrine which was held more firmly since the preacher was eager to display it in his own practice. At this time, certainly, Lowell’s conception of the function of the poet was blended with his apprehension of the divine order, and he entered upon the discharge of poetic duties with the seriousness which a young priest might have carried to the sacred office. The very suppression of his native humor, so that it makes only a few furtive leaps in his poetry up to this time,—for we are setting aside his boyish pranks in verse,—illustrates the exalted mood in which he was living.

The “Conversations on Some of the Old Poets” was published, as we have seen, in January, 1845,[45] but as soon as his own part of the book was done, he was free for a more vital venture: on the 26th of December, 1844, after a five years’ betrothal, he was married in her father’s house at Watertown to Maria White.

CHAPTER IV

IN THE ANTI-SLAVERY RANKS

1845-1849

In the spring of 1844 Mrs. White had taken her daughter Maria to Philadelphia to spare her the rigors of the North, and they had found lodgings at 127 Arch Street, with Friend Parker, a kindly Quakeress, who had made them acquainted with Mr. and Mrs. E. M. Davis, influential members of the Society of Friends. An intimacy grew up between them, for they had a strong bond of sympathy in their common zeal for the cause of anti-slavery and other reforms, and a few weeks after the return of the Whites to Watertown, Maria wrote to her new friends: “I have talked so much to James of Philadelphia, that I have inspired him with a desire to try its virtues if he has an opportunity. We shall probably be married in the spring and I wish very much to spend it there, instead of in our bleak New England, and we should do so if we heard of any opening or employment for him during so short a period as three months. I suppose the season for lectures would be over then, and I fear that Destiny has not been so kind as to arrange any exact labors for him then, simply because he wishes to go. But should you hear of any situation for a literary man at that time, however small the recompense, might I not depend on your kindness to let us know of it?”

For some reason the marriage took place as we have seen at the close of 1844, and not in the spring of 1845. Mr. and Mrs. Lowell stayed a day or two in New York at the New York Hotel, whose splendor amazed them, and reached Philadelphia on the first day of the new year. By a happy augury, the weather had been delightful on their journey, and they had almost a breath of summer in midwinter. They went at once to Friend Parker’s, and settled down to happy work. The scheme of lecturing had come to nothing, but Mr. Davis had arranged that Lowell should do some editorial work on the Pennsylvania Freeman. That paper had taken the place of the National Enquirer, when Benjamin Lundy relinquished its management. Whittier went to Philadelphia in the spring of 1838 to edit the Freeman, and remained there two years, when his frail health compelled him to retire. The paper had been temporarily suspended in the interest of the National Anti-Slavery Standard, but had been revived and was now under the editorial control of C. C. Burleigh and J. Miller McKim.

The situation of the young pair is sketched in the following letter to Robert Carter:—

Mrs. Lowell sings her second in this duet in a letter to Mrs. Hawthorne, written two days later, in which she says: “We are most delightfully situated here in every respect, surrounded with kind and sympathizing friends, yet allowed by them to be as quiet and retired as we choose; but it is always a pleasure to know you can have society if you wish for it, by walking a few steps beyond your own door. We live in a little chamber on the third story, quite low enough to be an attic, so that we feel classical in our environment: and we have one of the sweetest and most motherly of Quaker women to anticipate all our wants, and make us comfortable outwardly as we are blest inwardly. James’s prospects are as good as an author’s ought to be, and I begin to fear we shall not have the satisfaction of being so very poor after all. But we are, in spite of this disappointment of our expectations, the happiest of mortals or spirits, and cling to the skirts of every passing hour, though we know the next will bring us still more joy.”[47]

The young couple had no resources save their faculty for writing. Mrs. Lowell brought no dowry, but she had poetic sensibility, and fell to translating into verse from German poetry, especially from Uhland. Lowell, with increased confidence bred of the facility with which he had dashed off the “Conversations,” and with an unfailing spring of poetry, was ready for any sort of venture. His faithful friend, Mr. Briggs, who had just launched the first number of his new literary weekly, The Broadway Journal, was eager for contributions from both. “I am very proud,” he wrote on receiving Mrs. Lowell’s translation, “The Wreath,” from the German of Uhland, to be the first to introduce her new name to the public,” and he proposed all manner of topics for Lowell to write on, such as a paper on Hawthorne and one on Emerson, for a series of articles on “Our American Prose Writers,” which had been initiated with one on the now forgotten W. A. Jones. Lowell himself complained of a native indolence, and Briggs, who was skeptical of the force of this objection, proposed a very natural corrective:—

“There is no such stimulus to execution,” he writes, “as a sure reward. Now I would like to make a contract with you to furnish me with a column or two, or more, of prose matter, to suit yourself, in the shape of criticism, gossip, or anything else, once a week for six months or a year. You have no idea how easy a thing of this kind becomes when you know that you must do it. If you get nothing else by such an undertaking than the business habit, it would be worth your while. What will you do it for? If our means were sufficient, or success were secure, I would make you an offer that would be sufficiently tempting, but I am loath to make you one that may seem too small. Consider now, and let me know.”

Lowell’s affection for Briggs and his sympathy with him in his risky venture of a weekly literary journal made him at first well-disposed to contribute freely in response to the editor’s urgent invitation, and he was most generous in his attitude respecting payment. “You have been in business, my dear friend,” he writes to Briggs, “and know exactly how much you ought to give me with a proper regard to your own balance sheet at the end of the year. I know that your inclination will be to give me more than that. But more you ought not to give nor I to take. I leave it for you to decide. I should not like to bind myself to write every week, though I have no doubt that I shall be able to, and I have some fears that a contingent want of money may hereafter prove as sharp a spur to me as a contract.”

Mr. Briggs in reply was more explicit as to terms: “In regard to the compensation, it would be well to read Emerson’s essay on that subject. According to him, compensation is inevitable, therefore one need never give himself any trouble on the subject. Nature settles the whole business. You will be sure to receive due compensation for whatever you may do for the B. J. Poe writes for me at the rate of one dollar a column. If you will do so, I shall esteem it a capital bargain. The poetry I will pay for separately on a different principle.” Accordingly, a day or two after, Lowell wrote: “I send you the first of a series of four or five letters which you may print if you like it. If you do not like it, reject it without scruple. It may be a little too abolition for you as yet. I do not think it good at all, but Maria thinks better of it than I do (bating one or two coarse expressions in it). I do not consider it mine. I wrote it only in the hope of doing some good. So you may alter it as much as you please, if it will serve your turn. If, on the other hand, you like it, I think I may promise that the next will be better. I am in a great hurry, I have only time to say that I like your terms and am perfectly content to help you as much as I can.... I always expect to be taken at my word, so reject this without scruple.”

The letter thus sent purported to be by one Matthew Trueman, a country cousin to a supposed Member of Congress, scalping him for his vote on the question of the annexation of Texas. It was intended to be the first of a series in which the whole question of annexation was to be argued. It was addressed to no one in particular, but only to some hypothetical scoundrel. It will be remembered that annexation was the all-absorbing topic of political discussion during the winter of 1844-1845. Lowell could not do otherwise from his anti-slavery principles than bitterly condemn the action of Congress, and this letter was an outburst of satire and invective; but it did not see the light, and it was not followed by others in the same vein.

The editor of The Broadway Journal began fencing with the author. He wondered to whom it was addressed. He thought perhaps it would be best not to print the whole. “Your satire,” he wrote, “bruises instead of cutting the flesh, and makes a confounded sore place without letting out any of the patient’s bad blood. I will make as full a selection as I can; but there are certain expressions that could not be safely used in public.” He regrets that his friend should have lost so much time over the letter, but thinks it must have done him good by drawing off his superfluous zeal. “I shall think better of you myself for knowing that you can feel so strongly and write so harshly,” he adds: “it justifies the opinion that I expressed of you in my notice of your ‘Conversations;’” and after a further discussion of abolitionism in principle and practice, he begs him to write something about Philadelphia, or art, the academy, the abominable white doors, the poor watery oysters, everything and anything. “Put all your abolitionism into rhyme,” he concludes: “everybody will read it in that shape, and it will do good. Don’t forget that you are a poet and go to writing newspaper articles.”

The letter was shrewd, kind, reasonable to an uninterested reader, but must have been exacerbating to Lowell. Mr. Briggs could not conceal the final ground of his refusal, that to publish this and similar letters would be to jeopard the fortunes of The Broadway Journal, and in the sensitive condition of the mind of the out and out abolitionist, this was arrant cowardice. A good deal of correspondence followed, and Lowell lost his interest in the Journal, though he retained his strong affection for his friend and sent him, as well as a few poems, a slashing criticism of the exhibition in the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, and a review of Halleck’s “Alnwick Castle, with other Poems,” but The Broadway Journal itself died out of existence shortly, Mr. Briggs parting company with it at the end of a half year.[48] In sending the former of the two prose articles mentioned above, Lowell wrote:—

The other vehicle for Lowell’s more exclusively literary work during the winter of 1845 was Graham’s Magazine, published in Philadelphia. He had been a contributor since the spring of 1841, when he used the signature “H. Perceval,” which he had been employing in initial form in the Southern Literary Messenger. His contributions were all poems, some of which he had preserved in the two volumes already published, but in the number for February, 1845, there appeared his biographical and critical sketch of Poe in the series “Our Contributors,” which ran for a score of numbers and was accompanied by steel portraits. Graham was desirous of including Lowell in the series with a portrait by Page, but for some reason the plan fell through. In this sketch of Poe, Lowell used a discursive manner, giving expression in a lively fashion to his judgments of other poets in the past, but not hesitating to speak emphatically of the genius of Poe, whom he did not know personally.

“Mr. Poe,” he wrote, “is at once the most discriminating, philosophical, and fearless critic upon imaginative works who has written in America. It may be that we should qualify our remarks a little, and say that he might be, rather than that he always is, for he seems sometimes to mistake his phial of prussic acid for his inkstand.... Mr. Poe has that indescribable something which men have agreed to call genius.”

Lowell had offered to write this sketch in May, 1844, and had been supplied with biographical material by Poe himself, who moreover read the article in manuscript which Lowell sent at the end of September through their common friend, Mr. Briggs. During this winter of 1845 Poe was a lively subject of discussion by Lowell and his friends, for he was the most conspicuous figure in American literature at that time. His “Raven” appeared in The American Review for February, and his series of papers on plagiarism, with their acuteness, their ostentation of learning, and their malice, was trailing through the Mirror and The Broadway Journal. His name was linked with that of Briggs in the editorship of the Journal, and Briggs sometimes found it difficult to make clear to his friends just how responsibility was apportioned between them. It was impossible to regard this very insistent figure as an intellectual or æsthetic abstraction, and his personality was always getting in the way of a fair judgment. In a letter to Briggs, 16 January, 1845, Lowell remarks: “From a paragraph I saw yesterday in the Tribune I find that Poe has been at me in the Mirror. He has at least that chief element of a critic—a disregard of persons. He will be a very valuable coadjutor to you.” Briggs, who was at this time a warm defender of Poe, had read the article in the Mirror, which was a review of the “Conversations,” and assured Lowell that it was extremely laudatory and discriminating, and a few days later, after strongly praising “The Gold Bug” which he had just read, he says: “Do not trouble yourself about anybody’s gloriometer.... I have always misunderstood Poe from thinking him one of the Graham and Godey species, but I find him as different as possible. I think that you will like him well when you come to know him personally.” Briggs copied “The Raven” into his magazine and wrote enthusiastically to Lowell about it. But Lowell was deeply offended by what he termed “the grossness and vulgarity” of Poe’s treatment of Longfellow, especially in his offhand allusion to Mrs. Longfellow and her children. Briggs again came to Poe’s defence. “The allusion to Mrs. Longfellow,” he wrote, “was only a playful allusion to an abstract Mrs. Longfellow, for Poe did not know even that Longfellow was married; look at the thing again and you will see that it contains nothing offensive. Poe has, indeed, a very high admiration for Longfellow, and so he will say before he is done. For my own part I did not use to think well of Poe, but my love for you and implicit confidence in your judgment led me to abandon all my prejudices against him, when I read your account of him. The Rev. Mr. Griswold, of Philadelphia, told me some abominable lies about him, but a personal acquaintance with him has induced me to think highly of him. Perhaps some Philadelphian has been whispering foul things in your ear about him. Doubtless his sharp manner has made him many enemies. But you will think better of him when you meet him.”

Lowell, however, refused to be convinced. “The Rev. Mr. Griswold,” he said petulantly, “is an ass, and, what’s more, a knave, and even if he had said anything against Poe, I should not have believed it. But neither he nor any one else ever did. I remain of my old opinion about the allusion to Mrs. Longfellow. I remain of my old opinion about Poe, and I have no doubt that Poe estimates Longfellow’s poetical abilities more highly than I do perhaps, but I nevertheless do not like his two last articles. I still think Poe an invaluable contributor, but I like such articles as his review of Miss Barrett better than these last.”

Up to this time Lowell appears to have known Poe only through correspondence.[49] A few weeks later, when he was returning from Philadelphia to Cambridge, he called upon him, but the interview gave little satisfaction, due to the fact, mentioned by Mr. Briggs, that Poe was tipsy at the time. A few weeks later Lowell defended himself, in a letter to Briggs, against a charge of plagiarism made by Poe, and summed up his impressions as follows: “Poe, I am afraid, is wholly lacking in that element of manhood which, for want of a better name, we call character. It is something quite distinct from genius,—though all great geniuses are endowed with it. Hence we always think of Dante Alighieri, of Michelangelo, of Will Shakespeare, of John Milton,—while of such men as Gibbon and Hume we merely recall the works, and think of them as the author of this and that. As I prognosticated, I have made Poe my enemy by doing him a service.... Poe wishes to kick down the ladder by which he rose. He is welcome. But he does not attack me at a weak point. He probably cannot conceive of anybody’s writing for anything but a newspaper reputation or for posthumous fame, which is much the same thing magnified by distance. I have quite other aims.”

Finally, Briggs himself lost all patience with Poe, and replied to this letter: “You have formed a correct estimate of Poe’s characterless character. I have never met a person so utterly deficient of high motive. He cannot conceive of anybody’s doing anything except for his own personal advantage; and he says, with perfect sincerity and entire unconsciousness of the exposition which it makes of his own mind and heart, that he looks upon all reformers as madmen; and it is for this reason that he is so great an egoist; he cannot conceive why the world should not feel an interest in whatever interests him, because he feels no interest himself in what does not personally concern him.”

In all his critical writing after this time, Lowell never discussed Poe. His offhand characterization in “A Fable for Critics,”

passes at once into a lecture on his treatment of Longfellow. Poe was not a blackboard on which Lowell wrote his own virtues, but it is an illustration of the dominant ethical note in Lowell’s nature, especially at this time, that open as he was to the influence of poetry, and keenly sensitive to the melody and color to be found in exquisite language, he could not detach poetry from character. In his leaning toward reform, he tried to take poetry with him as a fellow-worker, but I do not think this really affected his judgment of Poe, and Briggs’s amusing report of Poe’s consignment of reformers to the mad-house was not likely to gall him; his sense of humor would correct any irritation. But Lowell did hold his head high and was intoxicated with the spirit of idealism; he and his wife stimulated each other, and breathing this air, he was not in a mood to be indulgent toward what he conceived to be lower ideals. The biographical essay which a few years later he wrote on Keats shows clearly how desirous he was of bringing the few known facts of that poet’s life into accord with a lofty conception of the poetic spirit; standing uncomfortably near Poe, he was in danger of interpreting his poetry by the comment which his life afforded.

Although literature then as always was the constant factor in Lowell’s resolve, the circumstances in which he was placed, and his own uneasy sense that he ought to bear his part in the moral uprising, led him to expend a good deal of energy this winter in political and ethical writing. He was living in the midst of the Society of Friends and breathing an atmosphere of anti-slavery reform; the great debate on Texas was raging, and, more than all, his wife by his side kept a steady flame of zeal burning. He let himself out once in verse when he sent to the Boston Courier some stanzas headed “Another Rallying Cry by a Yankee,” in which, with a vehemence that allowed little breathing space for wit or humor, he declaimed against the iniquity of the Texas resolutions, then on the eve of passage, and made a passionate appeal to his native state to hold herself aloof from any compromise with slavery.

he began, and employed all the resources of type to make his protest heard:—

The final stanza was a burst of state independence:

In these verses, as in others of a similar nature, Lowell seems almost to have followed the lead of Whittier, who employed the same stanza in several of his anti-slavery poems written before this time.

In his eager, impulsive desire to right wrongs, and his impatience at compromise, he chafed under the restraints laid upon him. The rebuff he received when he undertook to scarify the conscience of Congress in the pages of The Broadway Journal irritated him. He had hoped that the Journal would be a “powerful weapon in the hands of reform,” and was disheartened. “The reason I have written no prose for him (Briggs),” he wrote his friend Carter, “has been because I knew not what to write about. The Journal shut its doors in the face of every subject in which I was mainly interested, and I could not bring myself (in writing for a friend especially) to undertake subjects in which, feeling no interest, I could not possibly write well.” He had engaged to write regularly for the Pennsylvania Freeman, but even here he did not, in his own mind, have a clear field. “I do not feel entirely free,” he says in a letter to Carter, “in what I write for the paper, as its conductors are rather timid.” That is the complaint of most young reformers, and yet the constraint which appears in his articles is due rather to the caution with which he feels his way along a path where he is likely to be misjudged than to any outside repressive influence. At least this may be inferred from a reading of two articles which he contributed to the Freeman and which were no doubt looked upon as very radical utterances. They had for their heading “The Church and Clergy,” and were deliberate inquiries into the nature of the religious bodies in America as tested by the attitude which they took, organically, toward the great question of political reform, especially as regarded the subject of slavery. In a letter to Longfellow written a few weeks after this date, Lowell puts his belief into two or three pregnant sentences. “Christ,” he says, “has declared war against the Christianity of the world, and it must down. There is no help for it. The Church, that great bulwark of our practical Paganism, must be reformed from foundation to weathercock. Shall we not wield a trowel, nay, even carry the heavy bricks and mortar for such an enterprise? But I will not ride over you with my hard-mouthed hobby.”

In the two editorial articles referred to, Lowell takes the ground that when there is dereliction to pure ideals on the part of the more refined and intellectual members of the church, especially of those in the priestly order, there will be the greater zeal of the more brutal and unintelligent in defence of the church, and instances the cries of the Jewish populace for the crucifixion of the Saviour, the mob at Athens that condemned Socrates to drink the hemlock, and, taking a very recent example: “It was the most brutal and degraded of the English population which assaulted the pure-minded Wesley, and cock-fighting, horse racing, drunken priests and justices established their orthodoxy to the satisfaction of so competent a constituency by reviling or indicting him. Now that it has become necessary to protest against Protestantism, it is the ignorant and unthinking who are so eager to defend the right of private judgment by tarring and feathering all who differ with them.” The mass of men, Lowell goes on to say, love an easy religion, which affords a cheap and marketable kind of respectability. “Puritanism has always been unpopular among them as a system which demands too much and pays too little.” The clergy, too, in the United States, being dependent upon their hearers for support, unconsciously slip into the habit of adapting themselves to the prejudices and weaknesses of their supporters. Thus by degrees the church and religion are held to be synonymous terms, and the church becomes a kind of private estate, silent in the face of a great evil which the great body of Christian people has learned to tolerate. In point of fact true religious sentiment is the most powerful weapon in the world against slavery and all other social vices, but the religious system of the country as corrupted by connivance with evil is the greatest obstacle in the way. The only sure way of accomplishing its great object is for the church to keep in advance of popular morality, and “the surest and safest test for deciding when the time has arrived for the church to take another step forward is by observing whether it is reverenced by the wisest of its members as merely an external symbol of some former manifestation of Divinity, or is reverenced as containing in itself a present and living Divineness.”

But why, it might be asked, should the clergy be picked out for blame in the matter of upholding slavery, rather than any other class, as that of the merchants for example? The answer is plain. If the church professed to be no more than a society of private citizens meeting once a week, the clergyman would be simply the chairman of the gathering, and a mouthpiece of the majority. But the church sets up the claim to be of divine origin and the depository of truth. If this be so, it should always be in advance of public opinion. “It should not wait till the Washingtonians, by acting the part which, in virtue of the station it arrogates to itself, should have been its own, had driven it to sign the pledge and hold fellowship with the degraded and fallen. It should not wait until the Abolitionists, by working a change in the sentiment of the people, have convinced it that it is more politic to sympathize with the slave than with the slave-owner, before it ventures to lisp the alphabet of anti-slavery. The glorious privilege of leading the forlorn hope of truth, of facing the desperate waves of prejudice, of making itself vile in the eyes of men by choosing the humblest means of serving the despised cause of the master it professes to worship, all these belong to it in right of the position it assumes.” And he calls upon the clergy to produce certificates of martyrdom before he will accept the claims they set up for themselves.

The whole discussion is characterized by sincerity and a scarcely veiled sarcasm, and is interesting not only as showing Lowell’s thought at the time on a burning subject, but also as disclosing a certain academic air as if he had written carefully and with restraint, perhaps thinking how it would sound to his father’s ear. There is hardly more than a faint suggestion of the wit and humor which marked his later political writing, and there is one passage which may be noted as distinctly literary in tone. “In many parts of Germany,” he writes, “there are legends of buried churches and convents, whose bells are often heard, and in which, now and then, some person by a lucky chance can hear the monks chanting the ritual of many centuries ago. It seems to us that the religion of our churches is of very much the same subterranean and traditionary kind. To one walking in the pure light of upper day, the sound of their service seems dim and far off, and, if he catches a word here and there, it is an obsolete language which does not appeal to the present heart and soul, but only to a vague reverence for what is ancient, a mysterious awe for what is past.”

The winter had been passed in this experimental fashion, Mrs. Lowell translating poems from the German by her husband’s side, as he wrote now verse, now prose, intent on the questions of the day, yet never really giving himself out except now and then in some spontaneous bit of poetry. They made hosts of friends in Philadelphia and spent the last few weeks of their stay on a visit to the Davis family, with whom they had become close companions. Mrs. Hallowell, who was a child at the time, recalled the delight that attended their stay, especially the pleasure given the children by Mrs. Lowell, who told them fairy tales and recited ballads, giving the Caldon Low in a soft crooning voice sweeter than singing. They took a short driving tour with their hosts through Chester County, but near the end of May set out on their return to Cambridge, stopping by the way for a week’s visit with Mr. and Mrs. Briggs in Staten Island. They went home by way of Albany in order to see Page, and by the middle of June were established at Elmwood, where they formed one household with Lowell’s father, mother, and sister.

Lowell had not found himself out yet. He had, indeed, a premonitory consciousness of his strength. “I shall do something as an author yet,” he wrote to Briggs, 21 August, 1845. “It is my laziness and my dissatisfaction at everything I write that prevents me from doing more.” But he adds, “there is something, too, in feeling that the best part of your nature and your performance lies unmined and unappreciated.” For the present he seems to have written chiefly under the impulse created by some sudden affair, as in the verses “On the Capture of Fugitive Slaves near Washington,” which appeared in the Boston Courier, 19 July, 1845. The lines were prefaced by this note to the editor, Mr. Buckingham:—

“Reading lately in the newspapers an account of the capture of some fugitive slaves, within a few miles of the Capital of our Republic, I confess my astonishment at finding no comments made upon what seemed to me an act of unparalleled inhumanity. Thirty unfortunate disciples of the Declaration of Independence pursued and captured by some two hundred armed minions of tyranny! It seems strange that a burst of indignation from one end of our free country to the other did not follow so atrocious a deed. At least it seemed a proper occasion for sympathy on the part of one of our daily papers which a year or two ago indorsed Lord Morpeth’s sentiment that

Though such a mode of emancipation is totally abhorrent to my feelings, and though I would earnestly deprecate any attempt at insurrection on the part of our slave population, yet I confess to the weakness of being so far human in my feelings as to sympathize deeply with these unhappy beings who have been thwarted in their endeavor to convert themselves from chattels into men by the peaceful method of simply changing their geographical position. Under these feelings, and believing you to be a man with sufficient confidence in the justness of your own opinions not to fear to publish sentiments which may chance to go beyond or even directly contravene your own, I wrote the following lines.”

There is a prophetic ring to the verses which indicates how surely Lowell’s poetic spirit had absorbed the underlying truth of abolitionism. The poem is far less declamatory, more profoundly indignant than the Texas verses which he had printed in the same paper. The intimation which he gave in his prefatory note, that his sentiment might be unacceptable even to so hearty and honest a hater of slavery as Mr. Buckingham, plainly points to the doubt expressed whether a higher allegiance might not demand a revolt from the constitution and union if they were found to be the impregnable defence of slavery,—a doubt which was already certainty in the minds of the most radical of the abolitionists; but the stage of doubt was as far as Lowell ever went, and this may be taken as the utmost expression which he ever reached.[50] The poem was vigorous enough to make an impression, and successive numbers of the Courier show two long-winded writers knocking away at the spectre of Dissolution which the poem had raised.[51]

Although the summer of 1845 does not seem to have yielded much in the way of verse or prose, Lowell had quite definitely taken ground as a man of letters. There was no more talk of the law, and he even dropped lines of correspondence which had marked his old carelessness of occupation. “You hint in your last letter,” he wrote to E. M. Davis in October, that it must be very easy for me to write, because writing is my profession, while in truth this is precisely what makes it hard. You must recollect that it is vacation time with me when the pen is out of my hand. Before I became an author I used to write multitudes of letters to my friends. Then, wherever I set my foot, thoughts rose up before me short winged and chirping as the flights of grasshoppers which spring from the path of one who walks in September stubble-fields. The post-office was my safety-valve, which eased me in a trice of all my too explosive thoughts, humors, and moods. Now my thoughts take a higher and wider flight, and are not so easily followed and defined by the eye. I confess that my opinions seem to me of less importance.”[52]

By his regular and his random writing Lowell had met the expense of his winter in Philadelphia, and with his simple mode of life and his horror of debt it was not a very serious problem which his livelihood presented. Elmwood gave shelter, and the young couple shared the family economy. A little more ease, however, was to come through the accession of Mrs. Lowell to a share in the estate of her father, who died suddenly in September of this year. “I suppose,” Lowell writes in the letter just quoted, “that when the estate is settled (Mr. White died intestate) we shall be the possessors of $20,000 or more. I confess I hardly feel so independent as before. I believe that in this age poverty needs to have apostles, and I had resolved to be one, but I suppose God knows what is best for me, or the event would not have happened. That I should ever have lived to be such a nabob!”[53]

One of the effects of this modest fortune was to give the Lowells a further sense of independence and to lead them to form plans of travel and life abroad, for from the first the frailty of Mrs. Lowell’s health had been a factor in all their problems. They meant to go again to Philadelphia the next spring, and they looked forward to going to Italy in the coming fall for a two or three years’ residence. “Now that we know the amount of our property,” Mrs. Lowell wrote shortly after to Mrs. Davis, “it seems quite doubtful whether we shall be able to travel much; but we can live in Italy as cheaply as at home, and have all the advantages of climate and beautiful works of art besides.”

On the last day of the year their first child was born, and they gave her the name of Blanche in gentle allusion to Mrs. Lowell’s maiden name. Lowell wrote the news in a brief note on New Year’s Day, 1846, to Mr. Davis: “Our little daughter Blanche was born yesterday afternoon at 3-1/2 o’clock. She is a very fine hearty child, very fair and white, with red cheeks, and looks already a month old. Maria, thank God, is quite well.... Our fair has been eminently successful, more so than any hitherto. I received your tract only a day or two since, having only been to Boston once or twice for the last two months. I am much obliged to you for it, though my thankfulness is almost used up by the baby.”

How happy the parents were in their anticipation may be read in the affectionate terms in which Lowell had confided their hopes late in August to his friend Briggs. “Never mind what our child will be (if it should be born safely), we can at least enjoy our parentship now and fancy what glories we please of our little darling. We have christened it long ago. If she is a girl she is to be named Blanche (White), a sweet name, thus uniting Maria’s family name with mine. If a boy we shall call him Perceval, that being the given name of the first Lowle who set foot in America, and having, moreover, a pretty diminutive (Percie), an important thing for a boy. Now, do not set your wits at work to discover prophetically the unhearworthy nickname which the perverse ingenuity of boys will twist out of it at school. He shall never go to school. The only reason I have for a preference of sex is that girls ordinarily resemble the father most, and boys the mother. Therefore I hope for a boy, and if you knew Maria (I call her mother already) as well as I do, you would hope so too. It is true I can never persuade her of the force of this argument—because she does not know how good she is. When people arrive at that pitch of consciousness they are generally good for nothing.” And then follows the half-prophetic passage: I have never forgotten the sympathy I felt with your hopes and your disappointment in a similar case.... I look upon death so constantly and surely as but a continuation of life (after the glad removal or subsidence of the plethora of flesh which now chokes half the spirit out of us) that I shall be quite willing to send before us such an ambassador as our little angel would be if he goes sooner than we do. At all events, nothing can ever take away from me the joy I have already had in it.” The haunting fear which every young father has at such a time, and which Lowell intimates in these lines, was not made real at once, but the child lived with them only a brief fourteen months. It is touching to find Mrs. Lowell a month before the birth of her child writing verses of profound sympathy entitled “The Slave Mother,” in which she reflects the anguish such a mother feels on the birth of her child; and on the same day Lowell was writing his poem “The Falcon,” though in its original form, entitled “The Falconer,” it was longer and filled with a certain savage indignation over the quarry upon which the falcon, Truth, descends. Both poems were contributed to “The Liberty Bell,” published for the anti-slavery bazaar which was held each December in Boston. This was the social rally of the abolitionists and a resource with which to meet the modest demands of a crusade into which men and women threw themselves without counting the cost. Before and after her marriage Mrs. Lowell took an active part in the bazaar under the generalship of Mrs. Chapman. Lowell hits off the characteristics of those who were conspicuous in the local movement most wittily in his “Letter from Boston,” which he sent to the Pennsylvania Freeman, at the close of 1846.

The little child filled a large place in Lowell’s letters to his intimate friends. Briggs had sent a message to the newcomer, and Lowell replied: “Blanche was asleep when I read your kind wishes about her, and I did not dare to disturb her in an occupation in which she is sedulously perfecting herself by the most diligent practice. She has not yet learned our method of speech, and I to my sorrow have almost forgotten hers, so that I cannot honestly send any authentic messages from her to you. If you have been more happy than I in retaining a knowledge of the dialect of your infancy, you will perhaps be able to make something out of her remarks on hearing that she had loving friends so far away. ‘A goo (pianissimo) ah goo, errrrrr, ahg—(cut off by a kind of melodious jug-jug in her throat, as if she liked the phrase so well she must needs try to swallow it) ah! (fortissimo) a goo,’ followed by a smile which began in the dimple on her chin, and thence spread, like the circles round a pebble thrown into sunshiny water, with a golden ripple over the whole of her person, being most distinctly ecstatic in her fingers and toes. The speech was followed by a searching glance at her father, in whose arms she had her throne, to assure herself of his identity, and of her consequent security.”

A more exact knowledge of the amount of the legacy received from Mr. White’s estate and the income to be derived from it led the Lowells to abandon their first intention of going abroad soon, but, apparently in anticipation of such an emergency, Lowell had resolved to acquire a better colloquial knowledge of French. “As an evidence of my proficiency,” he writes to Briggs, “let me set down here an impromptu translation of that Chevy Chace of the nursery, ‘Three children sliding on the ice.’ As it is my first attempt at the ‘higher walks’ of French poetry, you must read it with due allowance.