[1] “Take up arms against a sea of troubles.”

[2] “The Pocket Celebration of the Fourth,” in the Atlantic for August, 1858, and “A Sample of Consistency,” in the same for November, 1858.

[3] Letters, i. 307-309.

[4] James Jackson Lowell.

[5] William Lowell Putnam.

[6] It was very likely after reading this poem that Emerson wrote in his diary, 17 January, 1862: “We will not again disparage America now that we have seen what men it will bear. What a certificate of good elements in the soil, climate, and institutions is Lowell, whose admirable verses I have just read! Such a creature more accredits the land than all the fops of Carolina discredit it.”

[7] See Letters, i. 318.

[8] Eight years later, when writing in his happiest mood the paper “A Good Word for Winter,” the memory of these boys came back with the suggestion of snow-forts, and tears trembled in the passage which slipped from his pen.

[9] Letters, i. 343.

[10] In an interesting letter to J. B. Thayer (Letters, ii. 191), Lowell says, comparing his odes with those of Gray and Coleridge: “All these were written for the closet—and mine for recitation. I chose my measures with my ears open. So I did in writing the poem on Rob Shaw. That is regular because meant only to be read, and because also I thought it should have in the form of its stanza something of the formality of an epitaph.”

[11] “In the Half-way House.”

[12] See Correspondence of J. L. Motley, ii. 167. Copied in Letters, i. 334.

[13] In a letter written to Mr. R. W. Gilder, 7 February, 1887, Lowell says: “I spent the night with my friend Norton last Wednesday. There I found a pile of the N. A. R.... By the way the January, ’64, number was ‘second edition.’ I fancy the old lady making her best curtsey at being thus called out before the footlights. The article was reprinted as a political tract and largely circulated. Lincoln wrote a letter to the publishers which I forgot to look for.”

[14] The fairy story was “Gold-Egg: a Dream Fantasy,” which appeared in the Atlantic for May, 1865.

[15] Letters of James Russell Lowell, i. 345, 346. Copyrighted 1893, by Harper & Brothers. Mrs. S. B. Herrick, whose friendship with Lowell will be referred to later, writes: “I was speaking to Mrs. Lowell of my strong admiration for its fire and eloquence, and she told me that after Mr. Lowell had agreed to deliver the poem on that occasion, he had tried in vain to write it. The last evening before the date fixed, he said to her: ‘I must write this poem to-night. Go to bed and do not let me feel that I am keeping you up, and I shall be more at ease.’ He began it at ten o’clock. At four in the morning he came to her door and said: ‘It is done and I am going to sleep now.’ She opened her eyes to see him standing haggard, actually wasted by the stress of labor and the excitement which had carried him through a poem full of passion and fire, of 523 lines in the space of six hours.”

[16] Lowell writes again of this and makes proposed changes and additions in a letter to Col. T. W. Higginson, 28 March, 1867. See Letters, i. 379.

[17] There was a curious psychical incident connected with the delivery of the Ode which came to light afterward but apparently was not recorded till several years later. The incident is fully set forth in two letters to Dr. William James, which were published in the Proceedings of the American Society for Psychical Research, March, 1889, where Dr. Royce printed a “Report of the Committee on Phantasms and Presentiments.” The first letter is from the gentleman in whose experience the incident occurred:—

The second letter is from Lowell, to whom Mr. W.’s letter had been sent by Dr. James:—

[18] Quoted by A. V. G. Allen in his Life and Letters of Phillips Brooks, i. 552.

[19] An interesting venture was made by Little, Brown & Co. in the summer of 1864, which unfortunately proved too uncertain to be carried through. Lowell was to have edited a series of volumes illustrative of the Old Dramatists, from Marlowe down. He prepared one volume, which was put into type but never published. A set of proofs is in the library of Harvard University.

[20] “James Russell Lowell,” in the Atlantic Monthly, January, 1892.

[21] “Shakespeare Once More,” iii. 33.

[22] “Chaucer,” iii. 292.

[23] “Thoreau,” i. 361.

[24] This was no doubt Cranch’s Kobboltozo.

[25] “To J. B. on sending me a seven-pound trout,” Atlantic Monthly, July, 1866.

[26] The lost copy of Donne turned up, and after Lowell’s death his daughter and Mr. Norton used it for the production of a special edition by the Grolier Club in 1895.

[27] See supra, i. 300-302.

[28] What Lowell thought of the impeachment business may be inferred from a passage in a letter written to Mr. Godkin, 20 December, 1867: “I was sorry to see you [in the Nation] relaxing a little about impeachment. For myself, I have seen no sufficient reason to change my old opinion of its folly. They remind me of the boy’s playing at hanging, who finds he has done it all right,—only forgotten to cut himself down. We might be able to stand it, we are a wonderful people, of course, but the other lesson of standing A. J. to the end of his tether is worth ten of this. The South is as mad now as it ever will be.”

[29] With a single exception, for which see infra, p. 122.

[30] Letters, i. 349.

[31] “Rousseau,” in Literary Essays, ii. 256.

[32] Letters, i. 408.

[33] After all Whittier changed his mind and gave his book the title “Among the Hills.”

[34] The bookbinder who wanted the lettering for the volume.

[35] Originally designed to make part of The Nooning.

[36] George Eliot’s The Spanish Gipsy.

[37] It was Gobright’s Recollections.

[38] Lowell amplified this thought in his paper on Chaucer, Literary Essays, iii. 299, 300.

[39] Letters, ii. 5. There was a reciprocity of feeling, if we may judge from the striking fact that on the right, within the gate which leads to the impressive common tomb of the Army of Tennessee, in New Orleans, is an inscription taken from Lowell’s poem, “On the Capture of Fugitive Slaves near Washington.”

[40] Perhaps it was on this journey that she told Mrs. Fields she never thought of her father as a poet, but just her father.

[41] Letters, ii. 52.

[42] Letters, ii. 35.

[43] Letters, ii. 38.

[44] See Letters, ii. 64-67. Also the Cambridge edition of Lowell’s poems, p. 479.

[45] On Goodwin’s Plutarch’s Morals.

[46] Yesterdays with Authors, published first in the Atlantic, where Lowell also read it, as “Our Whispering Gallery.”

[47] The first volume of Forster’s Dickens was published in advance of the others.

[48] Letters, ii. pp. 81-128.

[49] Mr. Norton with his family was at St. Germain, near Paris.

[50] The difficulty has since been obviated by the system of sabbatical years at Harvard, with half salary.

[51] After three weeks spent with Mr. Norton and his family at their hotel in Paris, Mr. and Mrs. Lowell moved across the river, upon the departure of their friends to London. As will be seen later, this little hotel became their familiar home whenever they were in Paris. They endeared themselves to their host and hostess, and long after there hung, perhaps still hangs, in the office, a large photograph of Lowell.

[52] A well known second-hand bookseller in Boston.

[53] Mrs. Burnett’s first child had lately been born.

[54] Letters, ii. 125.

[55] See Letters, ii. 115.

[56] “While the wise nose’s firm-built aquiline.”

[57] One clause of his will reads: “I give to the corporation of Harvard College, the Library thereof, my copy of Webster on Witchcraft, formerly belonging to Increase Mather, President of the College; and also any books from my library of which the College Library does not already possess copies, or of which the copies or editions in my library are for any reason whatever preferable to those possessed by the College Library.” He had at the time of his death about seven thousand books in his library.

[58] He was wont to assemble on the fly-leaf of a volume notable words that had struck him when reading the text, and it is worth noting that the careful index to the Riverside edition of Lowell’s writings contains under the heading “Words and Phrases” some seven score examples.

[59] The verse in “Agassiz” which cut deepest was that containing the lines

When he reprinted in the poem in Heartsease and Rue, Lowell made some verbal changes, and in this passage substituted “the Land of Honest Abraham” for the “Land of Broken Promise.” One may ponder over the change and settle it with himself which stings more, irony or sarcasm.

[60] The letter was also printed by Mr. Norton in Letters, with a few of the omitted passages filled in.

[61] The reference is to a volume by Mr. William Cleaver Wilkinson, entitled A Free Lance in the Field of Life and Letters, published in 1874, which contained three papers on “Mr. Lowell’s Poetry,” “Mr. Lowell’s ‘Cathedral,’” and “Mr. Lowell’s Prose.” In a letter to Mrs. Clifford (Letters, ii. 290) Lowell refers to this book apparently when he says: “You will be glad to hear that a man once devoted an entire volume to the exposure of my solecisms, or whatever he chose to call them. I never read it—lest it should spoil my style by making it conscious.” The papers on Lowell constitute, however, less than a third of Mr. Wilkinson’s book.

[62] See, for further detail, Mr. E. P. Bliss’s statement in Letters, ii. 160, 161, footnote.

[63] Mr. Blaine.

[64] Letters, ii. 171.

[65] Letters, ii. 173-178.

[66] Literary Friends and Acquaintances, pp. 237, 238.

[67] Elmwood, 5 June, 1877. Letters, ii. 104.

[68] To Miss Grace Norton. Letters, ii. 195, 196.

[69] Letters, ii. 200-202.

[70] Copied in Impressions of Spain, pp. 53-72.

[71] Señor Cánovas del Castillo.

[72] See, for the larger part, Impressions of Spain, pp. 23-42.

[73] “Bare is back without a brother behind it.”

Norse Proverb.

[74] Letters, i 343.

[75] New York Tribune, 16 August, 1891.

[76] Auld Lang Syne, p. 179.

[77] The succession of Mr. Arthur to the presidency naturally set flying all sorts of rumors about a fresh deal in high offices.

[78] The old inn at which he and the Fields had formerly stayed.

[79] “E Pluribus Unum,” Political Essays, pp. 67, 68. Printed first in the Atlantic Monthly, February, 1861.

[80] Despatch No. 132, dated 26 February, 1881.

[81] Foreign Relations, 1881, p. 543.

[82] The title of the act, called sometimes the “coercion” sometimes the “protection” act, was “An act for the better protection of person and property in Ireland.”

[83] Mr. Frelinghuysen had succeeded Mr. Blaine as Secretary of State.

[84] The New York Tribune, 5, 6 April, 1882.

[85] The Spectator, 1 August, 1891.

[86] Letters, ii. 293, 294.

[87] The Athenæum, 22 August, 1891.

[88] January, 1897. “Conversations with Mr. Lowell.”

[89] Literary Essays, iv.

[90] “The Place of the Independent in Politics,” in Literary and Political Addresses.

[91] 13 August, 1891.

[92] Report No. 1188, 49th Congress, 1st session, p. 28.

[93] All these remarks were stenographically reported and subjected probably to little revision, certainly to none by the speaker.

[94] Mr. James Welsh, representing the Typographical Union.

[95] See supra, vol. i. p. 293.

[96] “I went also,” he says, after hunting up the magazine in the Athenæum, “to see Whittier, who was in town. He was very cordial. There is a wrinkled freshness about him as of a russet apple in April, but I fear we shan’t have him much longer.”

[97] A month before Mr. Gilder had asked for a poem, and Lowell had put him off thus: “Rhymes for Gilder indeed! He doesn’t need ’em for he can make ’em. But I have a pocketful. I give you one at a time:—

After that, in a series of brief notes called out by the Landor article, there was a peppering of these lines, each note ending in a couplet, as—

“(Continued)

but in his next he is obliged to write: “I have lost my cue in the epic poem to Mrs. Gilder’s address. I thought I could carry it in my memory, but find that her pocket has holes in it.”

[98] That is, by parting with more of his land in Cambridge.

[99] Letters, ii. 337.

[100] See “A Poet’s Yorkshire Haunts,” in the Atlantic Monthly, August, 1895.

[101] Chickering Hall, New York, 28 November, 1887.

[102] In one of the verses of this poem Lowell had used the picturesque phrase:—

In answer to a criticism from a friend, he wrote: “There is no mixed metaphor. I don’t compare the waves to bulls, but merely say they are bull-fronted,—and so they are, with the foam curling over between their horns as in the bulls which I have often interviewed in the pastures here—with a stout stone wall between us viersteht sich. That I afterward say they leap like hounds implies no confusion of images. My dog Vixen has a bull-front, if ever there was one, and is always leaping about my knees, as my trousers can testify.—— saw the waves and heard ’em butt against the prow. Ask her. I always see what I describe while I am thinking of it. I see the waves now, as if I were in mid ocean on board the good barque Sultana in ’51.” To the same friend he wrote a month later: “I am glad you found something in the Téméraire for all that,—or try to be glad. But when I saw it in print, it saddened me.”

[103] Dr. Mitchell likewise received an honorary degree in medicine from the University of Bologna on this occasion.

[104] In a note to me at the same time he wrote: “I begin to examine my cards curiously, expecting to find that of Old Age overlooked in some corner.”

[105] The Westminster Gazette, 21 August, 1893.

[106] The poem was by Mr. Bliss Carman.

[107] “Small-Beer Chronicle,” in Roundabout Papers.

[108] An examination made after Lowell’s death showed that the bleeding with which the sickness began eighteen months or more previously was the first step in the course of the growth of a cancer of the kidney. The disease had extended to the liver, and at the last to the lungs.

[109] See an interesting note by W. J. Stillman in the Spectator, 1 July, 1899.

[110] For these details I am indebted to statements made by Mrs. Mary Lowell Putnam and to The Historic Genealogy of the Lowells of America from 1639 to 1899. Compiled and edited by Delmar R. Lowell.

[111] As Mrs. Lowell’s paternal ancestry went back but two generations on this side of the Atlantic, it has been thought well to trace her grandmother’s descent from Robert Cutt [the name later becoming Cutts], who was in the same generation with John Lowell, the son of the first Perceval Lowell. I am indebted for most of this material to Genealogy of the Cutts family in America, compiled by Cecil Hampden Cutts Howard. Albany: Joel Munsell’s Sons. 1892.

[112] Abbreviated afterward in this record as “Standard.”