The most substantial magazine in his own neighborhood was the North American Review, and to that, in his early period, Lowell contributed but half a dozen articles. It is partly characteristic of the manner of the heavy reviewing of the day, and wholly characteristic of Lowell, that in each of these cases quite two thirds of the article is taken up with prolegomena. Before he could settle down to an examination of “The New Timon,” he must needs analyze at great length the quality of Pope, who had served as a sort of pattern: it is interesting, by the way, to note that in the last paragraph of his review, he guesses the book to have been written by Bulwer. So in reviewing Disraeli’s “Tancred,” he despatches the book itself somewhat summarily after a dozen pages of witty reflections on novel-writing. A review of Browning is more definitely an examination of this poet, with large extracts from “Luria,” though it has the inevitable long introduction on poetry in general; but its appreciation and discriminating judgment of Browning at a time when “Sordello,” “Paracelsus,” and “Bells and Pomegranates” were the only poems and collection by which to measure him, indicate surely how direct and at first hand were Lowell’s critical appraisals. “Above all,” he says, after a glowing rehearsal of the contents of “Bells and Pomegranates,” “his personages are not mere mouthpieces for the author’s idiosyncrasies. We take leave of Mr. Browning at the end of ‘Sordello,’ and except in some shorter lyrics see no more of him. His men and women are men and women, and not Mr. Browning masquerading in different colored dominoes:” and in the same article occurs a passage which might lead one to think Lowell was musing over his own qualities: “Wit makes other men laugh, and that only once. It may be repeated indefinitely to new audiences and produce the same result. Humor makes the humorist himself laugh. He is a part of his humor, and it can never be repeated without loss.”

In the more substantial literary criticism of his maturity Lowell occupied himself mainly with the great names of world literature, but at this time he was especially intent on his contemporaries in America and England, and he was keenly alive to manifestations of spirit which gave evidence of transcending the bounds of local reputation. In a review of Longfellow’s “Kavanagh” he made the book really only a peg from which to hang a long disquisition upon nationality in literature, a subject which, it will be remembered, receives considerable attention in the book. Lowell’s own conclusion is that “Nationality is only a less narrow form of provincialism, a sublimer sort of clownishness and ill manners.”

It was with the heartiest good-will that he welcomed Thoreau’s “Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers,” just after the publication of that book. As in his other reviews of this period, he must needs preface his consideration of the book itself with some general remarks on travellers, which he liked well enough to preserve in his “Leaves from my Journal in Italy and Elsewhere,” published in “Fireside Travels;” but the main part of his article is a generous appreciation of Thoreau’s faculty of insight into the things of nature. “A graduate of Cambridge,—the fields and woods, the axe, the hoe, and the rake have since admitted him ad eundem. Mark how his imaginative sympathy goes beneath the crust, deeper down than that of Burns, and needs no plough to turn up the object of its muse.” He makes, however, a clear distinction between Thoreau the observer and man of reflection and Thoreau the bookman. “As long as he continues an honest Boswell, his book is delightful; but sometimes he serves his two rivers as Hazlitt did Northcote, and makes them run Thoreau or Emerson, or, indeed, anything but their own transparent element. What, for instance, have Concord and Merrimack to do with Boodh, themselves professors of an elder and to them wholly sufficient religion, namely, the willing subjects of watery laws, to seek their ocean? We have digressions on Boodh, on Anacreon (with translations hardly so good as Cowley), on Perseus, on Friendship, and we know not what. We come upon them like snags, jolting us headforemost out of our places as we are rowing placidly up stream, or drifting down. Mr. Thoreau becomes so absorbed in these discussions that he seems, as it were, to catch a crab, and disappears uncomfortably from his seat at the bow-oar. We could forgive them all, especially that on Books, and that on Friendship (which is worthy of one who has so long commerced with Nature and with Emerson), we could welcome them all, were they put by themselves at the end of the book. But as it is, they are out of proportion and out of place, and mar our Merrimacking dreadfully. We were bid to a river-party, not to be preached at. They thrust themselves obtrusively out of the narrative, like those quarries of red glass which the Bowery dandies (emulous of Sisyphus) push laboriously before them as breast-pins.” He finds fault with Thoreau for some of his verse, but regards with admiration his prose. “The style is compact, and the language has an antique purity like wine grown colorless with age.” Lowell expressed the same admiration for Thoreau’s style when he wrote again about him a dozen years later, after re-reading his books, but his point of view had by that time changed, and he was more concerned to look into Thoreau’s philosophy of life.

The article on Landor, written at this time, was quite exclusively an examination of the genius of a writer for whom he had long had a great admiration; and inasmuch as he had himself tried the form of conversation, it is worth while to note the excellent judgment he passes on Landor’s art. “Of his ‘Imaginary Conversations’ we may generally say that they would be better defined as dialogues between the imaginations of the persons introduced than between the persons themselves. There is a something in all men and women who deserve the much-abused title of individuals, which we call their character, something finer than the man or woman, and yet which is the man or woman nevertheless. We feel it in whatever they say or do, but it is better than their speech or deed, and can be conceived of apart from these. It is his own conceptions of the characters of different personages that Landor brings in as interlocutors. Between Shakespeare’s historical and ideal personages we perceive no difference in point of reality. They are alike historical to us. We allow him to substitute his Richard for the Richard of history, and we suspect that those are few who doubt whether Caliban ever existed. Whatever Hamlet and Cæsar say we feel to be theirs, though we know it to be Shakespeare’s. Whatever Landor puts into the mouth of Pericles and Michael Angelo and Tell, we know to be his, though we can conceive that it might have been theirs. Don Quixote would never have attacked any puppets of his. The hand which jerked the wires, and the mouth which uttered the speeches would have been too clearly visible.” Here again it is interesting to take up the reminiscences of Landor and of his own early acquaintance with his writings, which he printed in 1888, when introducing a group of Landor’s letters; for the comparison shows that though his enthusiasm for this writer had somewhat abated with years, the general tone of his judgment was the same.

The article on Landor was a deferred one. It was to have been written for the June number of the Massachusetts Quarterly Review, but did not appear till December. His child’s sickness and work on the “Biglow Papers” drove other things out of his head. Indeed, as he wrote rapidly when he was moved to write at all, so he was afflicted with obstinate inertia when ideas did not come spontaneously. “I am again a delinquent,” he wrote to Gay, 25 November, 1848,—“and this time I am ashamed to say, out of pure laziness and having nothing to write about. But my next article I intend to write on Tuesday, so that you will be sure of it in time. Do forgive me this once more, and forgive also (if you can) the stupidity of my contribution. I feel like a squeezed turnip on which the experiment of extracting blood has been tried. I am haunted, like Barnaby Rudge’s father, with the sound of a Bell, not having sent anything yet to that horrible annual.[85] Upon my word I am almost crazy with it. I have not an idea in my head, and believe firmly that I never shall have one again. And I obtained a reprieve ending a week ago last Friday!”

But if he groaned thus over writing for publication, he was lavish of criticism and what might be called material for literature, when writing to his friends. The letters which Mr. Norton prints, dated in this period, abound in felicitous comment on men and incidents, and even a postscript will sometimes ramble on into the dimensions almost of a separate letter. After indulging in a long epistle to Mr. Briggs, dated 12 May, 1848, he suddenly remembers that he means to send some poems of his wife’s for a collection which Griswold was making of the writings of the female poets of America; and after some lively comments on her contemporaries, he takes note of articles recently written by Briggs, and falls into a strain which he has disclosed elsewhere in somewhat similar terms: “You are wrong and N. P. W. is right (as I think) in the main, in what he says about American Society. There is as striking a want of external as of internal culture among our men. We ought to have produced the finest race of gentlemen in the world. But Europeans have laughed us into a nation of snobs. We are ashamed of our institutions. Our literature aims to convince Europe that America is as conservative and respectable as herself. I have often remarked that educated Americans have the least dignified bearing of any cultivated people. They all stoop in the shoulders, intellectually as well as physically. A nation of freemen, we alone of all others have the gait of slaves. The great power of the English aristocracy lies in their polish. That impresses the great middle class, who have a sort of dim conception of its value. A man gains in power as he gains in ease. It is a great advantage to him to be cultivated in all parts of his nature. Among scholars, R. W. E. has as fine a manner, as much poise, as I ever saw. Yet I have seen him quite dethroned by a pure man of the world. His face degenerated into a puzzled state. I go so far as to believe that all great men have felt the importance of the outward and visible impression they should produce. Socrates was as wise as Plato, indeed he was Plato’s master, but Plato dressed better, and has the greater name. Pericles was the first gentleman of Greece,—not the George IV. though, exactly. Remember Cæsar’s laurel-wig.

“I might multiply instances, but I wish to have room to say how much I have been pleased with Thackeray’s ‘Vanity Fair.’ He has not Dickens’s talents as a caricaturist, but he draws with more truth. Dickens can take a character to pieces and make us laugh immoderately at the comic parts of it—or he takes only the comic part, as boys take the honey-bag of the bee, destroying the whole insect to get at it. But Thackeray can put a character together. He has more constructive power. D. is a satirizer, T. a satirist. I don’t think D. ever made anything equal to Becky Sharp. Rawdon Crawley, too, is admirable; so in truth are all the characters in their way, except Amelia, who is nothing in particular.

“I liked ‘Wuthering Heights,’ too, as you did, though not so much. There is great power in it, but it is like looking at nature through a crooked pane of glass. Some English journalist has nicknamed the author Salvator Rosa, and our journalists of course all repeat it. But it is nonsense. For it is not wildness and rudeness that the author is remarkable for, but delicacy. A character may be distorted without being wild or rude. Unnatural causes may crook a violet as well as an oak. Rochester is a truly refined character, and his roughness and coarseness are only the shields (scabs, as it were) over his finer nature. My sheet ends our conversation.”

There is a picture of the Lowells at home at this time, drawn by Miss Fredrika Bremer. Lowell had reviewed her writings in their English dress—it was his first contribution to the North American,—and on her coming to America a meeting occurred, which resulted in a friendly visit paid by Miss Bremer to Elmwood. The form in which she recorded her impressions of travel was in letters home, afterward gathered into a book. It was on 15 December, 1849, that she wrote:—

“The whole family assembles every day for morning and evening prayer around the venerable old man; and he it is who blesses every meal. His prayers, which are always extempore, are full of the true and inward life, and I felt them as a pleasant, refreshing dew upon my head, and seldom arose from my knees with dry eyes. With him live his youngest son, the poet, and his wife; such a handsome and happy young couple as one can hardly imagine. He is full of life and youthful ardor, she as gentle, as delicate, and as fair as a lily, and one of the most lovable women that I have seen in this country, because her beauty is full of soul and grace, as is everything which she does or says. This young couple belong to the class of those of whom one can be quite sure; one could not for an hour, nay, not for half an hour, be doubtful about them. She, like him, has a poetical tendency, and has also written anonymously some poems, remarkable for their deep and tender feeling, especially maternal, but her mind has more philosophical depth than his. Singularly enough, I did not discern in him that deeply earnest spirit which charmed me in many of his poems. He seems to me occasionally to be brilliant, witty, gay, especially in the evening, when he has what he calls his ‘evening fever,’ and his talk is then like an incessant play of fireworks. I find him very agreeable and amiable; he seems to have many friends, mostly young men.... There is a trace of beauty and taste in everything she [Mrs. L.] touches, whether of mind or body; and above all she beautifies life.... Pity it is that this much-loved young wife seems to have delicate lungs. Her low, weak voice tells of this. [Madame Lowell was plainly not at home.] Maria reads her husband’s poetry charmingly well.”[86]

Near the close of 1849 Lowell reissued in two volumes, under the imprint of W. D. Ticknor & Co., the two series which had appeared in 1843 and 1847, and thus registered himself, as it were, among the regular vine-growers on the slopes of Parnassus. Moreover, with his former products thus formally garnered, he began to please himself with the prospect of some more thoroughgoing piece of poetical composition. He was practically clear of his regular engagement with the Standard, and his “Biglow Papers” had given him the opportunity to free his mind in an exhilarating fashion on the supreme question of the hour. There was something of a rebound from this in “The Vision of Sir Launfal,” but the free use of the Yankee vernacular with the immediate popularity which it secured must have set him thinking of the possibility of using this form in some freer and more genuinely poetic fashion. The little pastoral, “The Courtin’,” published in a fragmentary form, was an experiment in this direction at once highly successful, and accordingly we find him writing to Mr. Briggs on the eve of the publication of his two volumes of Poems: “I think you will find my poems improved in the new edition. I have not altered much, but I have left out the poorest and put others in their places. My next volume, I think, will show an advance. It is to be called ‘The Nooning.’ Now guess what it will be. The name suggests pleasant thoughts, does it not? But I shall not tell you anything about it yet, and you must not mention it.” And a few weeks later, with the project still high in his mind, he wrote to the same correspondent: “Maria invented the title for me, and is it not a pleasant one? I am going to bring together a party of half a dozen old friends at Elmwood. They go down to the river and bathe, and then one proposes that they shall go up into a great willow-tree (which stands at the end of the causey near our house, and has seats in it) to take their nooning. There they agree that each shall tell a story or recite a poem of some sort. In the tree they find a countryman already resting himself, who enters into the plan and tells a humorous tale, with touches of Yankee character and habits in it. I am to read my poem of the ‘Voyage of Leif’ to Vinland, in which I mean to bring my hero straight into Boston Bay, as befits a Bay-state poet. Two of my poems are already written—one ‘The Fountain of Youth’ (no connection with any other firm), and the other an ‘Address to the Muse’ by the Transcendentalist of the party. I guess I am safe in saying that the first of these two is the best thing I have done yet. But you shall judge when you see it. But ‘Leif’s Voyage’ is to be far better.” The scheme thus formed intended clearly a group of poems lightly tied together: indeed the plan, always a favorite one, was carried out on very nearly the same lines by Mr. Longfellow in his “Tales of a Wayside Inn” a dozen years later, and it is not impossible that Lowell, who had been interrupted in his plan, was still more reluctant to complete it, when it would have so much the air of being a copy of his neighbor’s design. At any rate, the disjecta membra of the poem found publication in a straggling fashion. Writing to Mr. J. B. Thayer, in reply to an inquiry about the poem, years after, Lowell says: “‘The June Idyl’ [renamed ‘Under the Willows’] (written in ’51 or ’52) is a part of what I had written as the induction to it. The description of spring in one of the ‘Biglow Papers’ is another fragment of the same, tagged with rhyme for the nonce. So is a passage in ‘Mason and Slidell,’ beginning ‘Oh strange new world.’ The ‘Voyage to Vinland,’ the ‘Pictures from Appledore,’ and ‘Fitz-Adam’s Story’ were written for the ‘Nooning’ as originally planned. So, you see, I had made some progress. Perhaps it will come by and by—not in the shape I meant at first, for something broke my life in two, and I cannot piece it together again. Besides, the Muse asks all of a man, and for many years I have been unable to give myself up as I would.” To this list should be added “Fragments of an Unfinished Poem,” which was printed in the author’s final Riverside edition, when he had abandoned all thought of completing the “Nooning.”

That Lowell was conscious of his vocation by this time, and that with the publication of his collected poems he was entering upon a new, resolute course of poetic action, is clear from a few pregnant sentences in a letter to Briggs, dated 23 January, 1850: My poems hitherto have been a true record of my life, and I mean that they shall continue to be.... I begin to feel that I must enter on a new year of my apprenticeship. My poems have thus far had a regular and natural sequence. First, Love and the mere happiness of existence beginning to be conscious of itself, then Freedom—both being the sides which Beauty presented to me—and now I am going to try more wholly after Beauty herself. Next, if I live, I shall present Life as I have seen it. In the ‘Nooning’ I shall have not even a glance towards Reform. If the poems I have already written are good for anything they are perennial, and it is tedious as well as foolish to repeat one’s self. I have preached sermons enow, and now I am going to come down out of the pulpit and go about among my parish. I shall turn my barrel over and read my old discourses; it will be time to write new ones when my hearers have sucked all the meaning out of those old ones. Certainly I shall not grind for any Philistines, whether Reformers or Conservatives. I find that Reform cannot take up the whole of me, and I am quite sure that eyes were given us to look about us with sometimes, and not to be always looking forward. If some of my good red-hot friends were to see this they would call me a backslider, but there are other directions in which one may get away from people besides the rearward one.... I am not certain that my next appearance will not be in a pamphlet on the Hungarian question in answer to the North American Review. But I shall not write anything if I can help it. I am tired of controversy, and, though I have cut out the oars with which to row up my friend Bowen, yet I have enough to do, and, besides, am not so well as usual, being troubled in my head as I was summer before last. I should like to play for a year, and after I have written and printed the ‘Nooning’ I mean to take a nooning and lie under the trees looking at the skies.”

The Hungarian movement interested both Lowell and his sister, Mrs. Putnam, deeply. Lowell had printed in the Standard his verses to Kossuth, and Mrs. Putnam had written vigorously in the Christian Examiner. Robert Carter also printed a series of papers on the subject in the Boston Atlas, which were reprinted in a pamphlet. Lowell did not write the pamphlet he meditated, but a year later he wrote seven columns in the Boston Daily Advertiser, in defence of his sister against Professor Bowen’s attack. “It was the severest job I ever undertook,” he wrote Gay. “I believe I was longer at work in actual hours than in writing all Hosea Biglow and the ‘Fable for Critics.’” He had displayed his interest previously by a stirring appeal for funds in aid of the Hungarian exiles.[87]

And now came three events to the little household at Elmwood that wrought a change in the life of Lowell and his wife. The first was the death of their third child, Rose, 2 February, 1850, after a half-year’s life only. The loss brought vividly to remembrance the experience which had entered so deeply into their lives when the first-born, Blanche, was taken away. “For Rose,” Lowell writes to Gay, “I would have no funeral; my father only made a prayer, and then I walked up alone to Mount Auburn and saw her body laid by her sister’s. She was a very lovely child—we think the loveliest of our three. She was more like Blanche than Mabel, and her disease was the same. Her illness lasted a week, but I never had any hope, so that she died to me the first day the doctor came. She was very beautiful—fair, with large dark gray eyes and fine features. Her smile was especially charming, and she was full of smiles till her sickness began. Dear little child! she had never spoken, only smiled.”

Again death came that way, and on 30 March, 1850, Lowell’s mother died. The cloud which had for years hung over her had deepened, and her death was looked upon as a release, for whether at home or in seclusion she was alike separated from her family. As Lowell wrote:—

The third event was the birth of the fourth child and only son, Walter. Gay had lately lost a boy, and Lowell’s announcement to him of this birth was tempered by the fact. “I should have written you a note the other day,” he writes, 3 January, 1851, “to let you know that we have a son, only I could not somehow make up my mind to it. It pained me to think of the associations which such news would revive in you. Yet I had rather you should hear it from me than from any one else.... The boy is a nice little fellow, and said (by his mother) to look like me. He was born on the 22d December, and I am doubting whether to name him Pilgrim Father or no. I have offered Maria her choice between that name and Larkin, which last I think would go uncommonly well with Lowell. She has not yet made up her mind.

“But now for the tragic part of it. Just after we had got him cleverly born on the 22d, there springs me up an Antiquary (like a Jack in a box) and asserts that the Pilgrims landed on the 21st, that eleven days were added instead of ten in allowing for O. S., and that there is no use in disputing about it. But I appeal to any sensible person (I have no reference to antiquaries) whether, as applied to Larkin, this decision be not of the nature of an ex post facto law, by which he, the said Larkin, ought not of right to be concluded. What was he to know of it in his retirement, with no access to reading-rooms or newspapers? Inheriting from his father a taste for anniversaries, no doubt he laid his plans with deliberation, and is he now to give up his birthright for a mess of antiquarian pottage? Had proper notice been given, he would surely have bestirred himself to have arrived a day earlier. On the whole I shall advise Larkin to contest the point. For my part, I shall stick to the 22d, though it upset the whole Gregorian calendar, which to me, indeed, smacks a little too strongly of the Scarlet Woman. Would

not the Pilgrim Fathers have sworn to the 22d, if they had known that ever a Pope of Rome would go for the 21st? Surely the Babe Unborn should not suffer for the want of accurate astronomical knowledge in them of old time. That other mythological character, the Oldest Inhabitant, should rather be held responsible as approaching nearer to a contemporaneousness with the guilty. However, till this matter is settled, I shall keep it to myself whether the 21st or the 22d were the day of his kindly nativity.”[89]

Lowell had been longing for a holiday; Mrs. Lowell’s health, never robust, gave him now new cause of solicitude; the death of his mother severed one special cord that would tie him to his home, and thus, in the spring of 1851, it was decided to carry out a design formed more than once before, and spend a year at least in Europe. The Lowells tried to persuade the Gays to accompany them, but without success. “We are going,” Lowell wrote to Gay, “in a fine ship which will sail from Boston on the 1st July. She was built for a packet, has fine accommodations, and will land us at Genoa—a very fit spot for us New-Worlders to land at and make our first discovery of the Old.

Also people can live like princes (only more respectably) in Italy on fifteen hundred a year. We are going to travel on our own land. That is, we shall spend at the rate of about ten acres a year, selling our birthrights as we go along for messes of European pottage. Well, Raphael and the rest of them are worth it. My plan is to sit down in Florence (where, at least, the coral and bells and the gutta-percha dogs will be cheaper) till I have cut my eye (talian) teeth. Tuscany must be a good place for that. Then I shall be able to travel about without being too monstrously cheated.”

CHAPTER VII

FIFTEEN MONTHS IN EUROPE

1851-1852

“I was the only one of the party at table that day, and there was an amount of vivacity among the dishes such as I never saw before. I took my soup by the process of absorption, the whole of it having suddenly leaped out of my plate into my lap. The table was literally at an angle of 45° all the time, with occasional eccentricities of the horizontal and the perpendicular, every change of level (or dip rather) being accomplished with a sudden jerk, which gave us a fine opportunity for studying the force of projectiles. Imagine the Captain, the First Mate, and myself at every one of these sudden hiccoughs (as it were) of the vessel, each endeavoring to think that he has six hands and finding too late that he has only two, during which interval between doubt and certainty, I have seen the contents of three dishes, A B C, change places, A taking the empty space left by B, B in like manner ejecting C, and C very naturally, having nowhere else to go, is thrown loose upon society and leads a nomadic life, first upon the tablecloth, then upon the seat, then upon the floor, every new position being a degradation, until at last it finds precarious lodging in one of the lee staterooms. You find your legs in a permanent condition of drunkenness, and that without any of the previous exhilaration. The surface of the country is such as I never saw described in any geographical work; the only thing at all approaching it which I have met with was the state of affairs during the great earthquake at Lisbon. You have just completed your arrangements for descending an inclined plane, when you find yourself climbing an almost perpendicular precipice, the surface of which being, by a curious freak of nature, of painted floor-cloth, renders your foothold quite precarious. It is like nothing but a nightmare.

“Mabel was very sick, and her only comfort was to lie in my berth and take ‘strange food’ (which she immediately returned again) through a spoon which opens in a very mysterious and interesting manner out of the handle of a knife which John Holmes gave me the day we sailed.[90] However, she was up again the next day, and has continued most devoted in her attendance at table, not to speak of little supernumerary lunches of crackers and toast which she contrives to extract from the compassion of the steward or cook. The galley is a favorite place of resort for her, to which she retires as one would to a summer-house, and where, inhaling the fumes from a cooking-stove of a very warm temperament, she converses with the cook (as well as I can learn) on cosmography, and picks up little separate bits of geography like disjointed fragments of several different dissected maps. With what extraordinary and thrilling narratives she repays him I can only guess, but I heard her this morning assuring Mary that she had seen two rats, one red and the other blue, running about the cabin. Indeed, her theories on the subject of natural history correspond with that era of the science when Goldsmith wrote his ‘Animated Nature.’ She cultivates her vocal powers by singing ‘Jeannette and Jeannot’ with extraordinary vigor, and with a total irrecognition of the original air, which may arise from some hereditary contempt of the French. She assists regularly at ‘’bouting ship,’ as she calls it, standing at the wheel with admirable gravity. The Captain always takes the wheel and issues the orders when the ship is put about, and as this ceremony has taken place pretty regularly every few hours for the last eight days, Mabel has acquired all the requisite phrases. At intervals during the day, a shrill voice may be heard crying out, “Bout ship!’ ‘Mainsail ha-u-l!’ ‘Tacks and sheets!’ ‘Let go and ha-u-ll,’ the whole prefixed by an exceedingly emphatic ‘Ha-a-a-rd a lee!!’ There is no part of the vessel except the hold and the rigging which she has not repeatedly inspected. With all the sailors she is on intimate terms, and employs them at odd hours in the manufacture of various articles of furniture.... Nannie has been a constant source of interest and amusement to Mabel, who climbs up to visit her every day fifty times at least, and gives her little handfuls of hay and oats which Nannie seems to eat with a particular relish.”

The humorous account of the chief mate which occurs in the section “In the Mediterranean,” in “Leaves from my Journal,” is taken from a full and lively letter written by Lowell a few days later on shipboard to his brother-in-law, Dr. Estes Howe. By that time they were off Tunis. “Perhaps the finest thing we have seen,” he writes to Dr. Howe, “was the first view of the African coast, which was Cape Espartel in Morocco. There were five mountains in the background, the highest being as tall as the Catskills, but the outlines much sharper and grander. They were heaped together as we saw the Adirondacks from Burlington. We were a whole day and half the night in beating through the Straits of Gibraltar, and had very fine views of the shores on both sides. The little Spanish town of Tarifa had a great charm for me, lying under a mountain opposite the Moorish coast, with its now useless walls all around it. The fires of the charcoal burners on the mountains were exceedingly picturesque, especially at night, when they gave to some dozen peaks on both sides the aspect of volcanoes. Apes Hill, opposite the rock of Gibraltar, is higher and more peculiar in its forms than the rock itself. In some views it is almost a perfect cone, and again, some of the lower peaks, when you can catch their individual outlines, are pyramidal. After getting through the Straits, we kept along the Spanish coast, with very light winds and a new moon, as far as Cape de Gat. We were four days in making these 150 miles (we ran 280 miles in one day on the Atlantic). All along there were noble mountains, with here and there a little white town sprinkled along their bases on the edge of the water like the grains of rice which the girl dropped in the fairy tale. Sometimes you see larger buildings on the slope of the mountain, which seem to be convents. All are white except the watch-towers, which you see now and then on points, and these are commonly of a soft brown, the color of the stone. The hues of the mountains at sunset and just after were exquisite. The nearer ones were of a deep purple, and I now understand what was meant by the Mediterranean atmosphere....”

The travellers made a brief halt at Malta, whence they took steamer to Naples, and from there went by rail to Florence. There they stayed, living in the Via Maggio, from the 26th of August to the 30th of October. Neither in his letters nor in the sketches which he afterward published under the title of “Leaves from my Journal in Italy and Elsewhere” can one find more than a slight record of Lowell’s sojourn in a city which was especially endeared to him by that study of Dante which had been his real introduction to the great world. “I liked my Florentine better than my Roman walks,” he said; “apart from any difference in the men, I had a far deeper emotion when I stood on the Sasso di Dante, than at Horace’s Sabine farm, or by the tomb of Virgil;”[91] for he found it harder “to bridge over the gulf of Paganism than of centuries,” and the marked individuality of mediæval Italian towns attracted him all the more for their being modern and Christian. In Florence there was an added pleasure in the companionship of Mr. and Mrs. Frank Shaw, and in the society of William Page.

In a letter to Mr. John Holmes, written from Rome half a year later, Lowell writes: “Once when I was in Florence, Page and Shaw and I took a walk out of the city to see a famous Cenacolo of Andrea del Sarto in the refectory of a suppressed convent, about a mile and a half outside the Porta Santa Croce. We took a roundabout course among the hills, going first to Galileo’s tower, and then to that of the old Church of San Miniato which Michelangelo defended. Thence we descended steeply toward the Arno, crossed it by a ferry-boat, and then found ourselves opposite a trattoria. It was a warm October day, and we unanimously turned in at the open door. There were three rooms, one upstairs, where one might dine ‘more obscurely and courageously’ the kitchen, and the room in which we were. As I sat upon the corner of the bench, I looked out through some grape-trailers which hung waving over the door, and saw first the Arno, then, beyond it a hill on which stood a villa with a garden laid out in squares with huge walls of box and a clump of tall black cypresses in the middle, then, to the right of this, the ruined tower of San Miniato, and beyond it that from which Milton had doubtless watched the moon rising ‘o’er the top of Fesole.’ This was my landscape. Behind me was the kitchen. The cook in his white linen cap was stirring alternately a huge cauldron of soup and a pan of sausages, which exploded into sudden flame now and then, as if by spontaneous combustion. A woman wound up at short intervals a jack which turned three or four chickens before the fire, and attended a kind of lake of hot fat in which countless tiny fishes darted, squirmed, and turned topsy-turvy in a way so much more active and with an expression of so much more enjoyment than is wont to characterize living fish, that you would have said they had now for the first time found their element, and were created to revel in boiling oil. The wine sold here was the produce of the vineyard which you could see behind and on each side of the little trattoria. We had a large loaf of bread, and something like a quart and a half of pure cool wine for nine of our cents. During the whole time I was in Florence, though I never saw any one drink water, I also never saw a single drunken man, except some Austrian soldiers, and only four of these—two of them officers. In Rome, also, drunkenness is exceedingly rare, but less so, I think, than in Florence. Here you see everywhere the sign, Spaccio d’ Acqua Vitæ. In Florence I never remember to have seen spirits advertised for sale, except by those who dealt in the wants of the Forestieri.”

Just before leaving the city for Rome, Lowell was filled with consternation at a letter received from home, telling him that his father had been stricken with paralysis. His first impulse was to take his family to Rome and then return at once to America, but a little reflection showed him how useless this would be. “I should never have left home,” he wrote his father from Pisa, where they had halted on their way to Leghorn, “if I had not thought that you wished it, or rather wished that we should have been abroad and got back. I hope to find a letter awaiting us at Rome. But at any rate we shall come home as soon as we can. I hardly know what I am writing, for I have just got word from Mr. Black at Leghorn, saying that our places are engaged on board the steamer for Civita Vecchia, and that we must be there as soon as possible in the morning. I am going on in the early train, leaving Maria to come at one o’clock with a servant from the hotel. It is now between nine and ten, and the rain still falls heavily. I fear a bad day to-morrow, and what with that and thinking about you and home, my mind is confused. I find nothing abroad which, after being seen, would tempt me away from Elmwood again. I enjoy the Art here, but I shall equally enjoy it there in the retrospect. I wish some of the buildings were on the other side of the water, but I suppose we should be more contented not to see them if they were.”

The voyage by steamer to Civita Vecchia was a very rough one, occupying five days instead of the eleven hours in which it sometimes was made. A letter from Dr. Howe was received a few days after the Lowells reached Rome, which gave more exact account of Dr. Lowell’s illness and left little hope of anything like permanent restoration. “Had it been possible,” Lowell replied to his brother-in-law, “I should have come home at once. But I could neither leave Maria here, nor safely expose her to the inclemencies of a winter passage across the Atlantic. There is nothing for it, but to hope and pray. But the thought that I have no right to be here casts a deeper shadow over everything in the dreary city of ruin and of an activity that is more sad than ruin itself. The dear Elmwood that has always looked so sunny in my memory comes now between me and the sun, and the long shadow of its eclipse follows and falls upon me everywhere. It is a wonderful satisfaction to me now to feel that dear Father and I have been so much at one and have been sources of so much happiness to each other for so many years.”

The entrance into Rome is thus described in a letter to Miss Maria Fay:—

“It has been raining fast, but as we approach Rome, winding up and down among the hills and hollows of the Campagna between high stone walls, the clouds break and the moon shines out with supreme clearness. The tall reeds which lean over the road here and there glisten like steel, wet as they still are with the rain. The orange-trees have all silver leaves, and even the dark laurels and cypresses glitter. It is like an enchanted garden of the Arabian Nights. Presently we overtake other lumbering diligences (we are posting and have done the thirty-five miles from Civita Vecchia in ten hours), and rattling through the gate are stopped by cocked-hatted officials, who demand passports. Opposite are the high walls of the Inquisition. We are in Rome. One ought to have a sensation, and one has. It is that of chill. One climbs stiffly down from the coupé, and stamps about with short-skirted and long-booted postilions whose huge spurs are clanking in every direction. Very soon we, being armed with a lascia passare,—there are three coach loads of us,—drive off, leaving four other loads behind still wrangling and jangling with the cocked hats. As we rattle away, the light from the window of the uffizio di polizia gleams upon the musket of a blue overcoated French soldier marching to and fro on guard. Five minutes more rattle and the Dome glistens silverly in the moonlight, and the Titanic colonnade marches solemnly by us in ranks without end. Then a glimpse of feathery fountains, a turn to the right, a strip of gloomy street, a sudden turn to the left, and we are on the bridge of St. Angelo. Bernini’s angels polk gayly on their pedestals with the emblems of the Passion in their arms, and by wringing your neck you may see behind you on the left the huge castle refusing to be comforted by the moonlight, with its triumphant archangel just alighting on its summit. Another sharp turn to the left, and you are in a black slit of street again, which at last, after half a mile of unsavoriness, becomes the Corso, the main street of modern Rome. And everything thus far is palpably modern, especially the Hotel d’Angleterre, at which we presently alight. Next day we remove to lodgings already engaged for us by F. Boott, near the Pincio, in the highest part of the city. Here we manage to be comfortable through a month of never-ceasing rain. Then it clears, and we have a month of cloudless sunshine, with roses blooming in the gardens and daisies in the fields. To-day is the first rainy day, and I devote it to you.”

The Lowells had their quarters at Capo le Case, No. 68, on the third piano, and were surrounded by a few English and American friends. Mr. and Mrs. Story were not in Rome when they first arrived, but joined them in about a fortnight, when the rains had ceased at last and so permitted walks in the Campagna. The first part of their stay had been dreary enough, and drew from Lowell the whimsical remark: “Sometimes as I look from the Pincian, I think that the best thing about [modern Rome] is that the hills look like Brighton.” And Mrs. Lowell draws a humorous picture of her husband, and their half homesick feelings, when she writes: “Through Mr. Black we have the English journals and papers, and it really gives me a little home feeling when I see a bundle of Examiners and Athenæums brought in just as they used to be from Mr. Wells’s, and see James selecting his cigar with particular satisfaction and giving the fire an express arrangement, and then drawing up his chair to it and putting his feet on the fender, beginning to read.”

The anxiety, also, which Lowell felt over his father’s illness benumbed his faculties and made him restless; but with fair weather, better news came, and the travellers gave themselves up more unreservedly to the pleasures which the great city afforded them. But Rome does not thrill one from the start. It takes time for its ancient hands to get that clutch which at last never loosens, and Lowell at first seemed somewhat unaffected. “I like,” he wrote to his father, just before Christmas, “to walk about in the fine sunshine and get unexpected and unguide-booked glimpses of fine scenery, but systematic sight-seeing is very irksome to me. Though we have been in Rome now nearly as long as we were in Florence, I have not learned to like it as well. We were able to enjoy Florence sincerely and without any reproaches, because we had not heard of your illness. Then, too, the churches here are nearly all alike. Going to see them is like standing to watch a procession of monks,—the same thing over and over again, and when you have seen one you have seen all. There is a kind of clumsy magnificence about them, like that of an elephant with his castle on his back and his gilded trappings, and the heaviness somehow weighs on one. There is no spring and soar in their architecture as in that of the Lombard churches I have seen. The Roman columns standing here and there look gentleman-like beside them, and reproach them with their tawdry parvenuism. The finest interior in Rome is that of the Sta. Maria degli Angeli, which Michelangelo made out of a single room in the baths of Diocletian. Even the size of St. Peter’s seems inconsiderable in a city where the Coliseum still stands in crater-like ruin, and where one may trace the foundations of a palace large enough almost for a city.... Yesterday I walked out upon the Campagna, but by a different gate from my favorite San Sebastiano. Leaving the Porta del Popolo, we followed the road as far as the Ponte Molle, then turned to the right on the hither bank of the Tiber, which we followed as far as the confluence of the Tiber and Anio, where was once the city of Antemnæ. As it had been destroyed by Romulus, however, there was nothing to be seen of the old Sabine stronghold except the flatiron-shaped bluff on which it stood, the natural height and steepness of which, aided no doubt by art, must have made the storming of it no very agreeable diversion. The view from the top is very beautiful, and it is a good place to study the Campagna scenery from,—I mean the Campagna in a state of nature. Below us flowed the swift and dirty Tiber, and the yet swifter and dirtier Anio. In front the Campagna wallowed away as far as the line of snow-streaked mountains which wall it in. Herds of cattle and of horses dotted it here and there, the gray cows looking like sheep in the distance to an eye used always to expect red in kine. Sometimes a sort of square tower rose, lonely and with no sign of life about it. Looking more carefully, however, it would turn out to be no tower at all, but only the cottage of a shepherd perched high above the inundation of malaria on the top of some ruinous tomb. Add malaria and the idea of desolation to an Illinois prairie, and you have the Campagna. Where Antemnæ had stood there now rose a conical wigwam built wholly of thatch, surmounted by a cross, at the door of which stood a woman in scarlet bodice and multitudinous petticoat, with a little girl ditto, ditto, but smaller. Seeing us get out a pocket spyglass, a boy of about eighteen years contrived to muster energy enough to come out and stare at us. He was dressed in sheepskin breeches with the wool on, short wide jacket, red waistcoat, and hat turned up at the side, and would have looked extremely well in a landscape—but nowhere else. A smaller boy came up with more impetuosity—fat, rosy-cheeked, Puck-like, and with eyes that looked as if their normal condition was that of being close-shut, but which once opened to the width necessary to take in the extraordinary apparition of three forestieri at once, would require some maternal aid to get back again. Large hawks were sliding over the, air above us, and there was no sound except the sharp whistle of a peasant attending a drove of horses in the pasture below. Jemmy will like to know that the horses are belled here (I mean in the fields) as cows are with us, only that the bells are large enough for a town school. To-night I am going to make the giro of the churches to see the ceremonies with which Christmas is ushered in. First an illumination at Santa Maria Maggiore and the cradle of the Saviour carried in procession at ten o’clock, then mass at midnight in the San Luigi dei Francesi, then mass at St. Peter’s at three o’clock A.M. I have not seen a ceremony of the church yet that was impressive, and hope to be better pleased to-night.”

How he spent his Christmas is told in a letter to Miss Fay:—

“Let me tell you about Christmas week, first premising that I go to church ceremonies here merely that I may see for myself that they are not worth seeing. Otherwise they are great bores and fitter for children. The chief quality of the music is its interminableness, made up of rises and falls, and of the ceremonies generally you may take a yard anywhere as of printed cotton, certain that in figure and quality it will be precisely like what has gone before, and what will follow after. On Christmas eve the Presepio, a piece of the manger in which the Saviour was cradled, was carried in procession at the church of Santa Maria Maggiore. Torches were stuck in the ground for nearly a quarter of a mile from the church, and ghostly dragoons in their long white cloaks (like Leonora’s lover) appeared and vanished at intervals in the uncertain light. The interior of the church is fine, but completely ruined by the trumpery hangings put up for the occasion. There were ambassadors’ boxes, as at the opera, and rows of raised seats on each side near the high altar, for such ladies as chose to come in black, with black veils upon their heads. I stood among the undistinguished faithful, and it being a fast, there was such a smell as if Wethersfield had been first deluged and then cooked by subterranean fires. I stood wedged between some very strong devotees (who must have squandered the savings of a year in a garlic debauch) in abject terror lest my head should be colonized from some of the overpopulated districts around me.

“At the end of the church I could dimly see the Pope, with a mitre on and off at intervals. There was endless Gregorian chanting, then comparative silence, with sudden epidemics among the crowd of standing painfully on tiptoe to stare at nothing; then more endless Gregorian chantings, more epidemics, and a faint suspicion of frankincense among the garlic; then something incomprehensible performed in dumb show by what seemed automaton candles, then an exceedingly slim procession with the Presepio, which I could not see for the simple reason that it was inclosed in a silver case. At this point the Hallelujahs of the choir were fine. Having now fairly bagged my spectacle, I crowded my way out at the risk of my ribs (for stone doorways are not elastic), and went home to smoke a cigar preparatory to a midnight excursion to San Luigi dei Francesi, where, according to rumor, there was to be fine music. Here I found more sight-seeing Inglesi, more garlic, more populous neighbors, more endless Gregorian chanting, more automaton candles, and at midnight a clash of music from a French band, not so good as our Brigade Band at home.

“Christmas day, went to St. Peter’s to hear mass celebrated by the Pope in person. Here were all kinds of antique costumes,—gentlemen in black velvet doublets with slashed sleeves and ruffs, other gentlemen in crimson ditto ditto, officers of the Swiss Guard in inlaid corselets, and privates of ditto in a kind of striped red and yellow barber’s pole uniform invented by Michelangelo, cardinals, bishops, ambassadors, etc., but not nearly so large a crowd as I expected. The music was good, and the whole ended by the Pope’s being carried through the Basilica blessing the people at intervals as he went along. I stood quite near and had a good view of his face. He looks like a fatter Edward Everett. This is one of the greatest ceremonies of the year. After it was over I stood in the piazza watching the equipages of the cardinals. Speaking of cardinals: I was walking the other day with an English friend, and we saw a cardinal coming toward us accompanied by his confessor and two footmen. Behind followed his carriage with a cocked-hatted coachman and another footman. Should we bow? He was old enough to deserve it, cardinal or not, so we bowed. Never did man get such percentage for an investment. First came off his Eminence’s hat. At a respectful interval came that of the confessor, at another respectful interval those of the coachman and footmen. It was like a detachment of the allied army marching on Dunsinane with a bough.

“I have spoken rather disrespectfully of the music here, but I have heard good since I came. On New Year’s day the Jesuits have a great celebration in the church of the Gesu. I took a two hours’ slice of it in the afternoon. The music was exceedingly fine, a remarkably well-trained choir accompanied by the finest organ in Rome. The soprano was a boy with a voice that, with my eyes shut, I could not have distinguished from that of a woman. We are having also, every Tuesday, concerts by the St. Peter’s choir, with music of Palestrina, Guglielmi, Mozart, etc. The music of Palestrina has a special charm for me, reminding me more than any I ever heard of the æolian harp with its dainty unexpectedness....

“In its modern architecture Rome does not please me so much as Florence, Pisa, Lucca, or Siena, on all of which the religion and politics of the Middle Ages have stamped themselves ineffaceably. The characteristic of Roman architecture is ostentation, not splendor, much less grace. Of course I am speaking generally—there are exceptions. But even in size the Roman remains dwarf all modern attempts.... There is something epic in the gray procession of aqueduct arches across the Campagna. They seem almost like the building of Nature, and are worthy of men whose eyes were toned to the proportions of an amphitheatre of mountains and of a city which received tribute from the entire world. Exceeding beautiful are the mountains which sentinel Rome,—the purple Alban mount, the gray-peaked Monte Gennaro, the hoary Lionessa, and farther off the blue island-like Soracte.

“In art also Rome is wondrously rich, especially in sculpture. For the study of painting I have seen no gallery like that of the Uffizi at Florence. And let me advise you, my dear Maria, to see all the Titians (of which there are many and good) in England. To me he is the greatest of the painters. This has one quality and that has another, but he combines more than any. I would rather be the owner of his ‘Sacred and Profane Love’ in the Borghese collection than of any single picture in Rome.[92]

“What do I do? I walk out upon the Campagna, I go to churches and galleries inadvertently (for I will not convert Italy into a monster exhibition), and I walk upon the Pincio. Here one may see all the Fashion and the Title of Rome. Here one may meet magnificent wet-nurses, bareheaded and red-bodiced, and insignificant princesses Paris-bonneted and corseted. Here one may see ermine mantles with so many tails that they remind you of the Arabian Nights. Here one may see the neat, clean-shirted, short-whiskered, always-conceited Englishman, feeling himself quite a Luther if he have struggled into a wide-awake hat; or the other Englishman with years of careful shaving showing unconquerably through the newly-assumed beard which he wears as unconsciously as Mrs. Todd might the Bloomer costume for the first time. Here you may see the American, every inch of him, from his hat to his boots, looking anxious not to commit itself. Here you may see all the foreign children in Rome, and among them Mabel, seeming as if her whole diet were capers, and that they had gradually penetrated and inspired her whole constitution. I have seen no pair of legs there which compared with hers either for size or for untamable activity. Here you may see the worst riding you can possibly imagine: Italians emulating the English style of rising in the stirrups and bumping forlornly in every direction; French officers, reminding one of the proverb of setting a beggar on horseback, and John Bulls, with superfluous eyeglass wedged in the left eye, chins run out over white chokers, and a general upward tendency of all the features as who should say, ‘Regard me attentively but awfully; I am on intimate terms with Lord Fitzpollywog.’ On Saturday evenings we are ‘at home.’ We have tea, cake, and friends.... The evening before last I went to a musical party at Mrs. Rich’s. You know what an English musical party is. Your average Englishman enjoys nothing beyond ‘God save the Queen,’ and that because he can either beat time or swell the chorus with his own private contribution of discord. But I saw here the dogged resolution of the people who have conquered America and India. There was no shrinking under long variations on the pianoforte, and I could well imagine a roast beef and plum-pudding basis under the solid indifference which outlasted a half-hour’s fiddling. Miss Fanny Erskine, a niece of our hostess, sang well, especially in German, and Emiliani is really a fine artist with the violin.”

In an earlier letter to Dr. Howe, Lowell had said: I begin to think myself too old to travel. As to men,—as I used to say at home,—the average of human nature to the square foot is very much the same everywhere; and as to buildings and such like monuments, I bring to them neither the mind nor the eye of twenty. In almost all such I find myself more interested, as they are exponents and illustrations of the spiritual and political life and progress of the people who built them. The relations of races to the physical world do not excite me to study and observation (only to be fruitfully pursued on the spot) in any proportion to the interest I feel in those relations to the moral advance of mankind, which one may as easily trace at home, in their history and literature, as here. But of Rome hereafter. I feel as if I should continue a stranger and foreigner during my whole six months’ residence here.” A month or so later he revised a little of this judgment in a letter to his father, in which he wrote: “You need not be afraid of our getting attached to Europe. I find the modes of life here more agreeable to me in some respects, but nothing can replace Elmwood. In regard to our coming home, the exact time will depend entirely on the accounts we get of your health. I do not wish to have the money we have spent thrown away, for I see no chance of our ever coming hither again, and so I wish to do everything as thoroughly as I can. I have profited already, I think, in the study of art. I make it a rule now on entering a gallery to endeavor to make out the painters of such pictures as I like by the internal characteristics of the works themselves. After I have made up my mind, I look at my catalogue. I find this an exceedingly good practice. Of all the more prominent painters, I can now distinguish the style and motive almost at a glance. Sometimes I make a particular study of a particular artist, if any gallery is especially rich in his works. Life is rather more picturesque here than with us, and I find that I am accumulating a certain kind of wealth which may be useful to me hereafter. The condition and character of the people also interest me much, and I think that my understanding of European politics will be much clearer than before my visit to Europe. To understand properly, however, requires time and thought and the power of dissociating real from accidental causes. I wish to see well what I see at all—and, if possible, would like to visit Germany, France, and England before coming home.”

The social life of Rome in the English and American circles engaged the travellers, and Lowell made his début as an actor. Private theatricals,” he writes his father, 1 February, 1852, “are all the rage now in Rome. There are three companies. I have an engagement in one of them under the management of Mr. Black, who has erected a pretty enough little theatre in the Palazzo Cini, where he has apartments,—or an apartment, as they would say here. We gave our first representation last Thursday night to a select audience of English and Americans. Our play was a portion of Midsummer Night’s Dream, including part of the fairy scenes, and the whole of the interlude of the clowns. In this interlude, I was the star, having the part of Bottom assigned to me. On the morning of Thursday, I wrote a prologue of some thirty lines which I recited to open the performances. This, to me, was the plum of the evening’s entertainment. In the first place, I do not think that the audience had any idea that I was a prologue at all, till I had got nearly through; for I was obliged to speak it in the costume of Bottom, not having time to dress in the interval between the prologue and my first appearance in character. But even if they guessed what I was about, it never entered their heads that it was intended to be funny till about the middle, when a particularly well-defined pun touched off a series of laughter-explosions which kept going off at intervals during the rest of my recitation, as the train ran along from one mind to another. It was exceedingly diverting to me, for, knowing the requisitions of a prologue, I had written it down to the meanest capacity, and all the jokes were a-b-abs. I was very much struck with the difference between an English and an American audience. The minds of our countrymen are infinitely quicker both in perception and conception, and I am certain my prologue would have set a room full of them in roars of laughter.”

The list of persons who engaged in these private theatricals is an interesting one. Mr. Charles C. Black, to whom Lowell refers, was the begetter of the entertainment, and with him were W. W. Story, Charles Hemans, Shakespeare Wood, W. Temple, J. Hayllar, and T. Crawford. There were two different representations of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” and Lowell wrote two separate prologues. The first began:—