which had charmed the ear and cheated the memory of Scott (I think it was) till he mistook it for his own. We had the ‘Star Spangled Banner,’ and two or three naval ballads which, to my ear, have the true rough and ready tone. Philip Cook, of Virginia, had written a few graceful and musical lyrics. We had ‘McFingal,’ as near its model as any imitation of the inimitable can be, but far indeed from that intricate subtlety of wit which makes ‘Hudibras’ a metaphysical study as well as an intellectual delight. We had in the ‘Federalist’ a mine of political wisdom by which even Burke might have profited, and whose golden veins are not yet exhausted, as foreign statists and jurists are beginning to discover. But of true literature we had next to nothing. Of what we had, Duyckinck’s scholarly ‘Cyclopædia of American Literature’ gives us an almost too satisfactory notion. Of what we had not, there was none to tell us, for there were no critics. We had no national unity, and therefore no national consciousness, and it is one of the first conditions of a virile and characteristic literature that it should feel solid and familiar earth under its feet. New England had indeed a kind of unity, but it was a provincial unity, and those hardy commonwealths that invented democracy were not and could not yet be quite in sympathy with the new America that was to adopt and expand it. Literature thrives in an air laden with tradition, in a soil ripe with immemorial culture, in the temperature, steady and stimulating, of historic associations. We had none of these. What semblance we had of them was English, and we long continued to bring earth from the mother-country to pot our imported plants with, as the crusaders brought home that of Palestine to be buried in. And all this time our native oak was dropping its unheeded acorns into the crannies of the rock where by and by their sturdy roots would make room for themselves and find fitting nourishment.

“Never was young nation on its way to seek its fortune so dumfounded as Brother Jonathan when John Bull, presenting what seemed to his startled eyes a blunderbuss, cried gruffly from the roadside, ‘Stand, and deliver a literature!’ He was in a ‘pretty fix,’ as he himself would have called it. After fumbling in all his pockets, he was obliged to confess that he hadn’t one about him at the moment, but vowed that he had left a beautiful one at home which he would have fetched along—only it was so everlasting heavy. If he had but known it, he carried with him the pledge of what he was seeking in that vernacular phrase ‘fix,’ which showed that he could invent a new word for a new need without asking leave of anybody.

“Meanwhile the answer to Sydney Smith’s scornful question was shaping itself. Already we had Irving, who after humorously satirizing the poverty of our annals in his ‘Knickerbocker,’ forced to feel the pensive beauty of what is ancient by the painful absence of it, first tried to create an artificial antiquity as a substitute, and then sought in the old world a kindlier atmosphere and themes more sympathetic with the dainty and carefully shaded phrase he loved. He first taught us the everliving charm of style, most invaluable and most difficult of lessons. Almost wholly English, he is yet our earliest classic, still loved in the Old Home and the New. Then came Cooper, our first radically American author, with the defects of style that come of half-culture, but a man of robust genius who, after a false start, looked about him to recognize in the New Man of the New World an unhackneyed and unconventional subject for Art. Brockden Brown had shown vivid glimpses of genius, but of a genius haunted by the phantasms of imagination and conscious of those substantial realities they mocked only as an opium eater might be. His models were lay figures shabby from their long service in the studios of Godwin and the Germans. Cooper first studied from the life, and it was the homo Americanus with our own limestone in his bones, our own iron in his blood, that sat to him. There had been pioneers before him, like Belknap and Breckenridge, who had, in woodman’s phrase, blazed the way for him, but he found new figures in the forest, autochthonous figures, and on the ocean, whose romance he was the first to divine, he touched a nerve of patriotic pride that still vibrates. I open upon my boyhood when I chance on a page of his best. In prose we had also Channing, who uttered the perceptions, at once delicate and penetrating like root fibres, of a singularly intuitive mind in a diction of sober fervor where the artist sometimes elbows aside the preacher; and Webster, the massive simplicity of whose language and the unwavering force of whose argument, flashing into eloquent flame as it heated, recalled to those who listened and saw before them one of the most august shapes manhood ever put on, no inadequate image of Pericles. We had little more. Emerson was still letting grow or trying in short flights those wings that were to lift him and us to Heaven’s sweetest air. Hawthorne, scarce out of his teens, had given in ‘Fanshawe’ some inkling of his instinct for style and of the direction his maturer genius was to choose, but no glimpse of that creative imagination, the most original and profound of these latter days. Our masters of historical narration were yet to come.

“In poetry we were still to seek. Byrant’s ‘Waterfowl’ had begun that immortal flight that will be followed by many a delighted eye long after ours shall have been darkened; Dana had written some verses which showed a velleity for better and sincerer things; Willis was frittering away a natural and genuine gift; Longfellow was preluding that sweet, pure, and sympathetic song which persuaded so many Englishmen that he must be a countrymen of theirs. In his case the question certainly became not ‘Who reads an American book?’ but ‘Who does not read one?’ Holmes had written one imperishable poem.

“This was the state of things when I was a boy. That old question, once so cruelly irritating, because it was so cruelly to the point, has long ago lost its sting. When I look round me on this platform, I see a company of authors whose books are read wherever English is read, and some whose books are read in languages that are other than their own. The American who lounges over an English railway-book-stall while his train is making-up sees almost as many volumes with names of his countrymen on their backs as he sees of native authors. American Literature has asserted and made good its claim to a definite place in the world. Sixty years ago there were only two American authors, Irving and Cooper, who could have lived by their literary incomes, and they fortunately had other sources of revenue. There are now scores who find in letters a handsome estate. Our literature has developed itself out of English literature, as our political forms have developed themselves out of English political forms, but with a difference. Not as parasitic plants fed from the parent stock, but only as new growths from seeds the mother tree has dropped, could they have prospered as they have done. And so our literature is a part of English literature and must always continue to be so, but, as I have said, with a difference. What that difference is, it would be very hard to define, though it be something of which we are very sensible when we read an American book. We are, I think, especially sensible of it in the biography of any of our countrymen, as I could not help feeling as I read that admirable one of Emerson by Mr. Cabot. There was nothing English in the conditions which shaped the earlier part of Emerson’s life. Something Scottish there was, it may be said, but the later life at Concord which was so beautiful in its noble simplicity, in its frugality never parsimonious, and practised to secure not wealth but independence, that is—or must we say was?—thoroughly American. Without pretension, without swagger, with the need of proclaiming itself, and with no affectation of that commonness which our late politicians seem to think especially dear to a democracy, it represented whatever was peculiar and whatever was best in the novel inspirations of our soil. These inspirations began to make themselves felt early in our history and I think I find traces of their influence even so long ago as the ‘Simple Cobbler of Agawam,’ published in 1647. Its author, Ward, had taken his second degree at Cambridge and was a man past middle life when be came over to Massachusetts, but I think his book would have been a different book had he written it in England. This Americanism which is there because we cannot help it, not put there because it is expected of us, gives, I think, a new note to our better literature and is what makes it fresh and welcome to foreign ears. We have developed, if we did not invent, a form of racy, popular humor, as original as it is possible for anything to be, which has found ideal utterance through the genius of ‘Mark Twain.’ I confess that I look upon this general sense of the comic among our people and the ready wit which condenses it into epigram, as one of the safeguards of our polity. If it be irreverent it is not superstitious; it has little respect for phrases; and no nonsense can long look it in the eye without flinching.”

“Heartsease and Rue” was published in the early spring of 1888 and immediately afterward Lowell printed in the Atlantic his poem “Turner’s Old Téméraire, under a Figure symbolizing the Church.” This poem and “How I consulted the Oracle of the Goldfishes,” which appeared in the Atlantic for August, 1889, were printed in the thin posthumous volume of “Last Poems,” and belong thus in the group which most effectively represents Lowell’s mood on the profoundest themes at the end of his life. The first poem in “Heartsease and Rue,” that on Agassiz, which heads the section entitled Friendship, has already been noted in connection with the time when it was written. A little of the same pathos of parting with old friends is in the postscript of the letter to Curtis, and in this as in the former, the poet’s mind runs on naturally in its speculation to the new To Be. A single hint of a thought which filled many of Lowell’s hours occurs in the poem when he says:—

but it is in the group of poems referred to above that one sees most clearly a recurrence to the great underlying questions of faith. With a half-mocking smile Lowell asks in “Credidimus Jovem regnare” if science has found the key which religion has lost, and falls back on the somewhat lame conclusion that he had best keep his key, which may be but a rusty inheritance, on the chance that the door and lock may some day be made to fit the key. Again, in the poem “How I consulted the Oracle of the Goldfishes,” where he muses over the realities and illusions of the spiritual world, he does not deny the doubts that have arisen in his own mind, but after all refuses to permit even his doubts to dismay him.

Nor will he allow himself, even when contemplating what he regards as the obscuration of the Church’s light, to look upon this as the last state of organic faith. He takes that noble painting by Turner, “The Fighting Téméraire tugged to her last berth, to be broken up,” and sees science, “a black demon, belching fire and steam,” drag it away “to gather weeds in the regardless stream.” Ruskin makes the picture an unconscious expression by the painter of his own return to die by the shore of the Thames, “the cold mists gathering over his strength, and all men crying out against him, and dragging the old ‘Fighting Téméraire’ out of their way, with dim, fuliginous contumely;” but surely this is rather the passionate comment of a disciple making his master’s work prophetic. Lowell’s poem strikes a deeper than a personal note. It is a fine imaginative conception, a rare interpretation of a great work of art by another work of art, and what is noticeable in the cry of the poem is the protest which Lowell, in his instinctive faith, makes against the finality of his own interpretation. He sees in imagination the splendid history of the church, and no fighter under Nelson could have witnessed this desolate funeral of the great ship with more anguish than Lowell has thrown into his pathetic words; but as the English sailor could have righted himself with a vision of the glories of the future English navy, so Lowell closes his dirge with a triumphant prophecy:—

In taking another great painting as the prompter of his verse, Titian’s so-called “Sacred and Profane Love,” Lowell again is not so much interpreting the painter’s thought as he is using the canvas for a mirror in which to read his own soul, and though in printing “Endymion” he adds the gloss “a mystical comment,” one may guess that Lowell in this twilight of his life, musing upon the ideals which had beckoned him from earliest days, still saw in the heavens that vision of beauty, of truth, and of freedom which had never been dethroned in his soul. Faithfulness to high emprise,—that at least he could declare of himself amidst all the doubt that beclouded his intellectual vision, and it was fitting that the poet should, in this veiled figure of Endymion, see the reflection of his own face and form.

In sending “Endymion” to his publishers for insertion in the volume “Heartsease and Rue,” Lowell had written from Deerfoot Farm, 20 December, 1887: “I hoped to have sent this [‘Endymion’] by Monday morning’s post, but for two days after my return my head continued to be cloggy and my vein wouldn’t flow. I have at last managed to give what seems to me as much consecutiveness as they need to what have been a heap of fragments in my note-books for years. Longer revolution in my head might round it better, but take it as a meteorolite, splintery still, but with some metallic iridescence here and there brought from some volcanic star. Let it come among poems of sentiment, and as the longest, first if possible.”

He was still looking forward at this time to full labors. He had been urged by his publishers to undertake the volume on Hawthorne in the American Men of Letters series. He had signified his assent in general, some time before, and seemed now to be deliberately contemplating the task, for he wrote four days after the last:—

“I think there have been one or two volumes published within a few years about old Salem. I should be glad to have them sent to me at Southborough. I have one little job of writing to finish, after which I shall revise my poems and prose for a new edition. I don’t know whether it be second childhood, but I am beginning to take an interest in them. Then I mean to take up Hawthorne in earnest....”

Before “Heartsease and Rue” was published Lowell had begun the task of setting in order all his writings. With some hesitation he published in the spring of 1888 a volume of “Political Essays,” in which he gathered the articles printed in the Atlantic and North American Review during the stormy war period, but he added as the final number his address on “The Independent in Politics,” given in New York, 13 April, 1888. It may be noted that, with no apparent definiteness of purpose, Lowell did in the closing years of his life sum up, in forms which occasions for the most part suggested, his leading principles and doctrines, as if in a series of valedictories. Thus “Democracy” was a confession of his fundamental belief in the region of world-politics; his address at Harvard was the one word on scholarship which at the end of a scholar’s life he most wished to say; his address before the Copyright League had touched on points in the great theme of literature which had been of lifelong interest; in his serious poetry, as we have seen, he touched upon those great themes of both worlds which, as a seer of visions all his life, he could not fail to find deepening in his thought; and now he took the opportunity furnished by a friendly audience to set forth some of those principles which had formed his rule of conduct throughout a life that had found active employment in citizenship. There is no lack of definiteness in this address, and yet the period just before its delivery, when he may be supposed to have prepared it, was one of even unwonted depression.

“It isn’t pleasant to think one’s self a failure at seventy,” he wrote 27 March, 1888, “and yet that’s the way it looks to me most of the time. I can’t do my best. That’s the very torment of it. Why not reconcile one’s self with being second-rate? Isn’t it better than nothing? No, ’tis being nowhere.” And on being expostulated with, he wrote again: “It isn’t the praise I care for (though of course I should like it as well as Milton did, I suppose),—I mean the praise of others,—but what I miss is a comfortable feeling of merit in myself. I have never even opened my new book since it was published—I haven’t dared.”

It would be idle to seek too narrowly for the causes of this despondency. As we have had frequent occasion to note, Lowell all his life was subject to fluctuation of moods. The most comprehensive cause was no doubt in the very constitution of his temperament, and as he was overclouded at times, so for him the sun when it shone was more brilliant than to many. But one asks most anxiously, are such moods superficial or do they trench upon the very citadel of being, sapping and mining the walls, so that if entrance is made, the very heart stops beating. In all the shifting of Lowell’s mind there were great fundamental beliefs from which he would not be separated. It may be that in those deepest laid foundations of being, where the bed-rock of faith in spiritual realities is discovered to be a ledge of the rock of ages, Lowell finally, as we have seen, confessed to an ultimate expression of faith, which was that of a child in the dark; but how was it as regards that firm belief in his country which had been a passion with him all his days, and was in truth an elemental faith with him? It is hard to read his last political discourse, “The Place of the Independent in Politics,” without a little sense of pain mingled with one’s admiration for the serenity of the temper with which Lowell made what was in effect a confession of his political faith; for when one comes to rest his hopes for his country in the remnant, he confesses almost to as much doubt as confidence. It must of course be remembered that Lowell had given expression to his large faith in democracy in his Birmingham address, and he calls the attention of his audience to this as an explanation of the terms in which he is to address his own countrymen. He might properly use a note of warning among a people whose cardinal doctrine was the democratic principle, and he was justified unquestionably in giving frankly his impressions of the low point to which political organizations had fallen. Still, in undertaking to account for the evolution of the democratic idea in American life, he was questioning whether after all opportunity had not much to do with it, and whether now that the walls were closing about this new country, the force of evolution had not been largely spent. The dangers imminent in the constant inflow of an ignorant body of foreigners, in the easy good-nature with which the American tolerated abuses, and in the aristocratic character of a civil service as diseased as the rotten borough of English politics,—these dangers rose before him, threatening, alarming. He had lost faith largely in the organic action of parties, chiefly because he saw in them the passive instruments of unscrupulous politicians; and he found the correction of this great evil in the increasing power of a neutral body. He even went so far as to find the only hope of salvation in the action of the Independents. “If the attempt should fail,” the attempt that is to reform the parties from without, “the failure of the experiment of democracy would inevitably follow.”

This is not the place to discuss the merits of such a question. What I wish is to show the working of Lowell’s mind on those political subjects which had occupied him from boyhood. He was consistent throughout in holding lightly to any allegiance to party, and in valuing highly the integrity of the individual conscience, and his plea, gathering force as it proceeds, is for such a spirit of devotion to the great ideals of the country as shall compel the union of like-minded patriots in accomplishing the great active reforms that press upon the minds of thoughtful men.

“What we want,” he says in conclusion, “is an active class who will insist in season and out of season that we shall have a country ... whose very name shall not only, as now it does, stir us as with the sound of a trumpet, but shall call out all that is best within us by offering us the radiant image of something better and nobler and more enduring than we, of something that shall fulfil our own thwarted aspiration, when we are but a handful of forgotten dust in the soil trodden by a race whom we shall have helped to make more worthy of their inheritance than we ourselves had the power, I might almost say the means, to be.”

No, Lowell’s last word to his countrymen in domestic politics was not one of despair, however it may have been tinged with a sense of temporary defeat. It was because of his strong love that he was jealous of the honor of his country. The sadness is that of one weary in the fight, but the last note, as in the other instances of his valedictories, was a call to action and the reassertion of his undying faith in his country. Yet, as in the other instances, there is the pathetic note of faith in spite of the evidence of sight.

Once again, a little later than this, he was called on to preside at a dinner of the Civil Service Reform Association, and something of what he then said may be quoted as showing how hope and courage came to the front with him when great national issues were in question. “If I am sometimes inclined to fancy,” he then said, “as old men will, that the world I see about me is not so pleasant as that on which my eyes first opened, yet I am bound to admit on cross-examining myself, that it is on the whole a better world, better especially in the wider distribution of the civilized and civilizing elements which compose it, better for the increased demands made upon it by those who were once dumb and helpless and for their increasing power to enforce those demands. But every advance in the right direction which I have witnessed has seemed painfully slow. And painfully slow it was, if measured, as we are apt to measure, by the standard of our own little lives, and not, as we should, by that larger life of the community which can afford to wait.

“Every reform like that in which we are interested has to contend with vested interests, and of all vested interests abuses are those which are most adroit in putting a specious gloss on their monopolies and most unscrupulous as to the weapons to be used in their defence. The evil system which we would fain replace with a better has gone on so long that it almost seems part of the order of nature. It is a barbarous and dangerous system. When I was in Spain I saw reason to think that the decay of that noble nation, due, no doubt, to many causes, was due above all to a Civil Service like our own that had gone farther on the inevitable road which ours is going.

“It should seem that a reform like ours, so reasonable, so convenient, so economical, would at once commend itself to the good sense of the people. And I think there are manifest signs that it is more and more so commending itself. The humanity of our day is willing (as our ancestors were not) that the state should support its inefficient members. But did humorist ever conceive a more wasteful way of supporting them than by paying them salaries for performing ill the minor and more mechanical functions of government, thus making this inefficiency costly to every one of us in his daily affairs? Even supposing them capable of becoming efficient, the chances are that, just when they have learned their business, they will be dismissed to make room for other apprentices to pass through the same routine. My own experience has convinced me that not only our social credit, but our business interests have suffered greatly by the theory still more or less prevalent that a man good for nothing else was just the thing for one of the smaller foreign consulates.”

CHAPTER XVII

THE LAST YEARS

1888-1891

“My gout began in Bologna. It announced itself on Tuesday by an illness which prevented me from venturing out, and so a very pretty speech in Italian which I had in my head remained there to the great loss of mankind. Doctor Weir Mitchell[103] came to me at once on hearing of my disorder, so that I was able to be out next day to receive my degree with the rest. As I walked home from the ceremony I found myself very lame and foreboded what was coming to pass. I got off with Story to Milan by the train leaving Bologna at 1 A.M. I spent Thursday in Milan, where I provided myself with felt slippers, and next day started for London to escape being ill in an Italian inn. I got through the thirty-one hours’ journey fairly well with the help of the Glasgow delegates Ramsay and Ferguson, who helped me in every way. I don’t think my journey did me any harm. By the time I reached Calais on Saturday I was able to get on my boot again and thought I had got over the worst, but next day I had to resign myself to my sofa, and for ten days was in intense pain. The whole foot in every joint and the ankle were inflamed. For three days the other foot (in the toe joint only) took sides with its mate, and I was discouraged. This, however, passed off, and last Thursday [5 July] I was able to be dressed. To-day I have my boots on, though stropeato. Ecce tutte.”

He was in Whitby again in August, living as he liked so well now to do with his books and letters and few friends and the walks which were little more than easy strolls. He wrote to his friend Mrs. Leslie Stephen who was at St. Ives in Cornwall: “I am still pretty lame (do you know I begin to think that I am really seventy at last, and not playing that I am) and can take only short walks. But I hope that the air here will gradually blow the years out of me again. And the fish diet, too, a far more invigorating animal here than in your sleepy Southern waters which have done nothing but sun themselves and doze since Sir Cloudesley Shovel’s days. What are your pilchards when you contrive to catch ’em, and your gurnards (of which latter indeed nothing is left but a petrified head fit only for the table of a geologist that ever I heard of) to our cod and whiting and ling, to speak of no others, with their flesh hardened by constant struggle with our cold Northern waters? Why, your poor fellows have to come all the way hither to catch even a herring, while we have them fresh from the sea every morning. I wish I could send you a few as we know them. And where is your Abbey? We are under the special protection of B. V. Sanctæ Hildæ with the added flavor in our prayers that she was a king’s daughter and therefore of our set, and with that sympathy for our special infirmities that comes of knowledge. If you have any saint ’tis some fellow with a name you can’t pronounce, and who understands nothing but Cornish, whereas Hilda spoke English, as Freeman has proved over and over again.”

To Mr. Norton, who had been advising with him on some points in the translation of Dante, he wrote from Whitby: “You put me some pretty stiff conundrums, but I will try.... The swoon at the end of the canto (Inferno III.) is a nut too hard for my hammer. I have turned it and tapped it on every corner that seemed hopeful without making so much as a crack in it. Tambernic and Pietrapana might fall on it in vain. I must have expressed myself clumsily in my last letter. I did not mean to counsel paraphrase in the text, but at foot of page for the help of the Philistine to whom all poetry is a dead language. At best the translation of a poem is a waxen image of the living original, and being too literal is to dress it in the very clothes it wore as if the reality were in them.

“I do not know whether I told you that my last attack of gout had left me more infirm than ever before. I am still lame in both feet, though I insist on walking in the hope of getting limber and because without exercise I can’t sleep. We have had disastrous weather here, a cold of Antenora, with fierce winds to drive it in. Even the stones of the Abbey seem to feel it and shudder. I am sitting by a fire as I write. For the first time I begin to think myself capable of growing old.[104]

“I am in the same lodgings as last year, which is a pleasure to me, with kind, simple people, who do all they can to make me happy. They are very like our New England country folk, except in accent, almost the same thing in fact.”

In this letter Lowell intimates one of the physical ills that were attacking him, the loss of sleep. One of his friends and admirers, Canon Stubbs, gave this reminiscence,[105] not long after Lowell’s death. “Some years ago,” he writes, “I was in the habit of meeting him from time to time at the country house of a common friend. One especial evening—a ‘golden night of memory’—I shall never forget. After dinner one of the guests asked Lowell to read one of his own poems. This request he playfully put aside, but he began to talk to us about Wordsworth, and read to us part of the ‘Laodamia,’ commenting, as he read, much I confess to my surprise, on the narrowness and limited experience of Wordsworth, and the one-sided development of his intellectual powers. Then some chance expression turned the current of his talk, and he began describing, with all the quaint humor and delightful raillery of which he was so complete a master, a special antidote to sleeplessness which he said he had himself lately devised,—the invention of new chapters in Cæsar’s Commentaries on the Gallic War. I wish I could remember the chapter which he then recited. The aptness of the Latin phraseology was irresistibly funny. It told ‘how Vercingetorix and his army, retreating before Cæsar, had taken refuge on a high, rocky hill, strongly fortified and precipitous on every side, from which at first Cæsar had despaired of dislodging him without a long siege. But while Cæsar was considering these things an opportunity of acting successfully seemed to offer. He noticed a fissure in the rock, which on investigation by night was discovered to pierce the hill from side to side. [Here we expected the anachronism of dynamite or gunpowder. But no; Lowell more justly appreciated the natural genius of Cæsar.] Knowing that the winter was now nigh at hand, Cæsar ordered two legions of soldiers to block up with clay and twisted willow work the opposite ends of the rocky cleft, and then, having filled the chasm with water, to await the issue. That night the frost came; the water expanded; the high rock was cleft asunder; and down came Vercingetorix and his army. For this success’—Lowell concluded—‘a supplication of twenty days was decreed by the Senate upon receiving Cæsar’s letter.’”

After a visit to St. Ives, Lowell returned to London and remained there till the middle of November. His friends the Misses Lawrence were at Wildbad. As he never quite finished his couplets to Mrs. Gilder, so he never quite exhausted the playful names he gave these two ladies. “O Giminy,” he wrote from London, 1 October “(for I have exhausted all other ways of expressing your twinship in my affection, and any opening exclamation will suit the context), O Giminy, I say, how can you be happy in a hotel that Klumpps with a double p like a man with a club foot, and in a town which, by its own confession, is both wild and bad? What are you doing there? Taking the baths? You can’t soak the goodness out of you, if you try never so hard, that’s one comfort. You ‘admired the traces of the Romans at Treves’ did you? Pray, did you see the Holy Coat? That is what the place is famous for, bless your innocent souls. And then your single room at Munich with ‘2 or 3 Bismarcks, as many Gladstones and Döllingers’ in it. Do you expect me to believe that? It would have been uninhabitable had there been only one apiece of them, and you know it. You trifle with my understanding. Smoky London, indeed! The sky to-day is like a gigantic blue bell tipped over to pour out the sunshine it cannot contain. And the town is emptily delightful and one does not see a soul one knows from one end of the week to t’other. I shouldn’t mind its being fuller by a dozen or so, my Ambidue among them. Indeed, I was thinking yesterday of writing to ask where you were and when you were coming back to the lovers who (all but one of them) make me so jealous. The middle of October seems a great way off to that single inoffensive one, but ’tis better than nothing. I shall be here till the middle of November, and you will let me know the moment you come, won’t you?

“I haven’t the least notion where Wildbad is, and you give no geographical details, so I don’t feel sure that this will ever reach the Hôtel Klumpppppp though there can’t be two of that name even in this most patient of worlds. Did Wagner ever set it to music? Methinks ’twould have suited his emphatic and somewhat halting genius. But I shall try for a guide-book, and if this never reaches you, I shall be consoled with thinking that you will never know how little you have lost.

“I am very well, almost as well as before my gout; but I am rather dull, as you were just saying to each other. However, your return will brighten me, and you shall take me to the play and the opera and Madame Tussaud’s just as often as you please. And I invite myself to dine with you too—I mean two. Am I not generous? The nearer I get to the end of my sheet (like a prisoner escaping and doubtful where he was going to drop) the more I wonder where Wildbad is. I shall ask at a foreign book-shop. That is the simplest plan, for they are all kept by German Jews who know every place where Christians are plundered the world over. And if a Bad of any kind does not come within that definition I am greatly mistaken. My only doubt would be as to whether you were Christians? Well, you have always treated me as if you were. Good-by.”

Lowell spent a night at Chester with Mr. Hughes and sailed from Liverpool 22 November. He spent the winter of 1888-1889 at his sister’s, Mrs. Putnam’s, in Boston. He found himself physically depressed and disinclined to any effort. A hasty acceptance of an invitation to lecture in Philadelphia brought him intolerable discomfort, and he begged to be let off, if it could be done without prejudice to his hosts. “It is absurd,” he wrote, “but I was made so. I won’t torment myself by speaking in public any more. With any such engagement on my mind, I can do nothing else, and indeed do nothing but think about that.” Dr. Mitchell at once released him, and Lowell wrote in reply, 27 December, 1888: “I got your welcome letter last evening, and when I first looked in the glass this morning I was pleased to find my hair less gray than when I went to bed. You never wrote a better prescription. My mind has been relieved of what really seemed to me an intolerable weight, for, whether it be from old age or whatever cause, I have been undoubtedly inert both in body and mind since my attack of gout last summer.” On the same day he wrote to Mr. Gilder: “Many thanks for your welcome home. I am miserably dumpy, thank you, with the remains of my tedious fit of gout last summer, which continues to hold my frontier posts as the British did ours after the treaty of 1783. But I hope to go on to Washington early in February in time to get back for my seventieth birthday, which I can’t spend in the tents of Kedar.”

Lowell’s visit to Philadelphia and Washington is pleasantly reflected in his letters. His son-in-law, Mr. Burnett, was at that time a member of the House of Representatives, and Lowell, though he expressed a fear lest his lion’s mane should blow off, was entertained agreeably and came away with an admiration for many of the public men he met. His seventieth birthday came shortly after his return to Boston, when he was given a dinner at the Tavern Club over which Mr. Norton presided. “I was listening to my own praises for two hours last night,” he wrote to Mrs. Fields, “and have hardly got used to the discovery of how great a man I am.” He heard these praises again in a more public way when the Critic of New York made its number for 23 February a “Lowell birthday number,” having collected warm tributes of affection and admiration from seventy men and women of note in America and England. By an ingenious alphabetical arrangement the editor displayed his letters from Y to A, the astronomer Young heading the list and the poet Aldrich closing it. The English names naturally were fewer in number, but they included Tennyson and his son, Gladstone, Lord Coleridge, Lang, Locker-Lampson, and Palgrave; amongst his own countrymen were those yet his seniors, Holmes, Whittier, Mrs. Stowe, the elder Furness, and President Barnard, while the poet Parsons born in the same year and a host of juniors joined in the chorus of loving praise. As Dr. Horace Howard Furness truly said: “It is no small tribute, in itself, to Mr. Lowell that we should all be thus ready to praise him to his face.”

Lowell had set the date for his annual pilgrimage to England at 27 April, but a pressing invitation to speak on the 30th of that month at the great celebration in New York of the hundredth anniversary of Washington’s inauguration as first president, which he tried in vain to decline, compelled him to postpone his departure for nearly a month. Meanwhile he worked somewhat fitfully at literature, belabored as he was with letters and social distractions. Mr. Aldrich asked him to write for the Atlantic a paper on John Bright, who had just died. At first he thought he could write it, but a fortnight later he wrote: “There is no use in trying. Cold molasses is swift as a weaver’s shuttle compared with my wits. I have essayed every side of the subject like a beetle in a tumbler and find myself on my back after each attempt. So you must let me give it up.” It was characteristic of his unfailing interest in all genuine literature, new or old, that he should at the same time have written to Mr. Aldrich his pleasure in a poem, “Deaths in April,” in the current Atlantic. “Too intricate and even obscure I thought it here and there, but perhaps the intricacy is of forest-boughs and the obscurity nothing more than the gloom which they teach light to counterfeit. Never mind, ’tis the Muses’ utterance.”[106]

The special piece of writing which did occupy him for awhile, an introduction to Isaak Walton’s “Complete Angler,” may fairly be called one of the happiest of his literary appreciations. He writes, to be sure, to Dr. Mitchell that he is “thoroughly fagged” with the work, but to the unsuspecting reader who comes upon it in the volume of Lowell’s “Latest Literary Essays and Addresses” there is the sense only of a quieter tone than he finds in the Gray, for example, in the same volume. There is no lack of acuteness, rather one is struck with the delicacy of the criticism, but the special charm is in the delight which Lowell takes in his sunny-tempered author. It is as if he had been thoroughly fagged when he took Walton down and as he read the “Lives” and the “Complete Angler” was drawn within the cheerful mind of Walton and warmed himself at the open fire of his charity. The paper has the value one finds so often in Lowell’s writings, of reflecting the writer’s mood, and one who has followed Lowell into the recesses of his consciousness of age can scarcely fail to bear him company when he finds him writing of Walton: “But what justifies and ennobles these lower loves (of music, painting, good ale, and a pipe), what gives him a special and native aroma like that of Alexander, is that above all he loved the beauty of holiness and those ways of taking and of spending life that make it wholesome for ourselves and our fellows. His view of the world is not of the widest, but it is the Delectable Mountains that bound the prospect. Never surely was there a more lovable man, nor one to whom love found access by more avenues of sympathy.”

The after-dinner speech for which Lowell consented to postpone his summer journey to England was in response to the toast “Our Literature.” The speech appears as the last piece of literature which Lowell published in his collected writings, and it is a coincidence that this should stand at the end of his career, when at the beginning, if we may, not unnaturally, count The Pioneer as his formal bow in the profession of letters, stood the announcement of his outlook on national literature. Nearly forty-seven years lie between the two deliverances. As a young man of twenty-three he scouted the idea of an artificial division between the literature of America and that of England, he deprecated the too close dependence upon the current judgments of English writers for the press, and he pleaded eagerly for a natural literature in America, the free reflection of a free people. Now, with the reflection of age he considers in his brief space those fundamental principles which make for the endurance of a national literature,—the right sense of proportion between things material and things spiritual, the necessity of inviolable standards, the dependence upon the whole literature of the world. His last word is a word of hope, as was befitting a prophet of literature, standing at the end of the first century of a nation’s life, as years are measured from the consciousness of existence.

“The literature of a people should be the record of its joys and sorrows, its aspirations and its shortcomings, its wisdom and its folly, the confidant of its soul. We cannot say that our own as yet suffices us, but I believe that he who stands a hundred years hence where I am standing now, conscious that he speaks to the most powerful and prosperous community ever devised or developed by man, will speak of our literature with the assurance of one who beholds what we hope for and aspire after become a reality and a possession forever.”

Lowell sailed for England 18 May, 1889, and spent five months there at his customary haunts in London and in Whitby, revisiting his old friends and preferring the intimate associations to the social functions. “You ask me so many things,” he writes to Mrs. Clifford from Radnor Place, 17 June, “in such a breathless way—all of them disparate, and some of them desperate—that I know not which way to turn. Besides, haven’t you confessed that you set springes in your notes? And how can I tell but that every? is a springe (they look like it), and that I may not find myself dangling like an unwary hare with no chance ever to put my foot into anything again? However, I will tread cautiously and give each of ’em a little preliminary shake to see if there be any mischief in ’em.

“1st. Will I come to tea Thursday? I turn it over gingerly—it lies quite still and doesn’t seem likely to go off with a jerk. I think it harmless and answer ‘yes.’ I don’t like the artist being there with her pictures, for that may incur me the expense of several fibs, and I am not sure how many I have left.

“2d. Do I know Miss——? This looks more suspicious and I give it a wide berth.

“3d. Have I read ‘A Conversation in a Balcony’? Here I seem safe enough because I haven’t. So I reply boldly, ‘I have sent for it and will read it.’

“4th. Will I take your head off? This is a specific proposition and therefore less likely to have any dolus hidden in it, and you offer me a prodigious bribe. But no, I won’t! I have a better opinion of your top-piece than you have (for the moment), and think it more useful and becoming where it is. Moreover, there was never head heard of that looked well after it was off except Charlotte Corday’s, and this is worth your consideration, and I am sure (since you are a woman) will have it. So we will wait. But I will come Thursday.”

There is a playfulness about all Lowell’s letters during this last summer he was to spend in England, a pleasure in little things, as in his walks and encounters, and a deep draught of delight in the sea. His month at Whitby lengthened to six weeks, and he was reluctant to leave this secluded corner. Here he read Dante and Milton, Lope de Vega and Calderon, Byron, and some old French texts. He felt uncommonly well, and he even wrote a poem, “The Brook,” for which the New York Ledger had offered a generous sum.

When Lowell returned to America he went back to Elmwood. Mrs. Burnett had arranged to return with her children and make a home there for her father, and it was with a long sigh of content that he settled himself in a place which was endeared to him by lifelong attachment. Yet it was with some discomposure that he looked upon the changes going on in the neighborhood. The village of Cambridge had long ago become a city, though still retaining a lingering village air, but now houses were creeping toward the confines of the town and filling those great empty spaces which had given him the sense of delightful roominess. He was a genuine conservative as regards places, and no doubt his English residence had confirmed his conviction that it was well to strike root deeply in planting the family, which is the greatest conservative force. A few years before, when he was minister to England, I brought him news of the neighborhood, and his brow clouded as I reported the rumor that more horse-car tracks were to be laid near Elmwood. “I never, never will go back there to live,” he declared vehemently, “if they make these inroads on my place.” He had been forced to reduce the area of the estate as it was in his father’s day and his youth, but he was jealous of any further encroachment on the integrity of his little patch of land, and in a world of change about him clung tenaciously to his foot-hold.

During the winter of 1889-1890 Lowell occupied himself with preparing a uniform edition of his writings, and answered one or two of the applications he had for poems or papers. His own needs were few, he lived simply, and he was under no stress of necessity, but he was eager to turn over with increment the little estate he had to his daughter and her children. Mr. Howells had interested himself in procuring a poem from Lowell for Harper’s Monthly, for which a liberal sum was paid, and Lowell, when the transaction was over, wrote him: “I happened to want the money, and though one cannot write a poem for money, one is glad to get what one can for it once written. You partly know how it is with me. My heart’s desire is to leave Mabel as independent as I can, and what I leave will, at best, hardly go round among so many. Now I had got myself into a place where I could not keep certain promises I had made without encroaching on my principal. Your benefice will just tide me over. The sacredness of my little pile has become almost a cult with me.”