That is the epithet Lowell bestows on Chartres Cathedral, and in the few spirited lines in which he contrasts the Greek with the Goth, and hints at the historic evolution of the latter, he is in a large way reflecting the native constitution of his own mind,
In the letters which Lowell wrote when “The Cathedral” was stirring his mind one sees most impressively the struggle which was always more or less racking him of an unfulfilled poetic power. The very spontaneity of his nature was in a way an obstacle to expression. He waited for the waters to be troubled, he was critical of his moods, of his opportunities, and when the moment was seized, if he could indeed hold it, he was supremely happy. “How happy I was while I was writing it,” he says just as the poem is to be published; “for weeks it and I were alone in the world till Fanny well-nigh grew jealous.” And yet in the very memory of this bliss he is haunted by the thought of that black care which rides behind. “You don’t know, my dear Charles, what it is to have sordid cares, to be shivering on the steep edge of your bank-book, beyond which lies debt. I am willing to say it to you, because I know I should have written more and better. They say it is good to be obliged to do what we don’t like, but I am sure it is not good for me—it wastes so much time in the mere forethought of what you are to do.” The matter was not made easier by the pride and honorable resolve not to mortgage the future for the sake of some present indulgence. Lowell went without things he wanted rather than get into debt for them, and though he chafed under the conditions which compelled him to the doing of irksome tasks, he would borrow no short-lived ease. In making up an account with Mr. Fields at the close of 1869, when he found himself on the wrong side of the ledger, he wrote: “You must allow me also to clear off the rest ... as soon as I can. There is no earthly reason why I shouldn’t, and a great many why I should. I hate any kind of money obligations between friends. When I have paid this off, the kindness will be left, and the obligation gone. I shall be able to manage it before long. I never could see any reason why poets should claim immunity beyond other folks. It is not wholesome for them.” Even in petty matters he disliked exceedingly to be under pecuniary obligation. His letters to Mr. Godkin, as printed by Mr. Norton, show an unconquerable aversion to being a “deadhead” under any circumstances, and I remember once, when I went with him to the Museum of Fine Arts for some special exhibition, his annoyance at finding it was a free day and he could not pay the ordinary toll.
His prose work, in 1869, included his papers on Chaucer and Pope, and his “Good Word for Winter,” and at the end of the year he issued a selection from what he had already written, in the first series of “Among My Books.” But his slowly growing collection of published writings did not add materially to his income, and he continued to be embarrassed by the poverty of a landholder who had heavy taxes to pay and only the meagrest return from the productive part of his estate. The only relief he could foresee was in the possible sale of some of his land.
The point to be noted, however, is that with all this pressure of need, Lowell knew himself so well that he would not, even when a golden bait was dangled before him, accept invitations to write which required of him the diligence and the punctuality of the hack workman. No. He would attend to his college duties, do what he could for the North American, and accept the occasional opportunity which offered for reading a lecture. He honored his art, and he refused to make it a perfunctory task. His old friend Robert Carter was now editor of Appleton’s Journal, and very naturally sought contributions from Lowell, but Lowell replied in a letter written 11 March, 1870:
“Many thanks for your Journal, which I have looked through with a great deal of pleasure, and which I should think likely to do good in raising the public taste.
“I am much obliged to you also for your proposal, though I cannot accept it. I have not time. I have not that happy gift of inspired knowledge so common in this country, and work more and more slowly toward conclusions as I get older. I give on an average twelve hours a day to study (after my own fashion), but I find real knowledge slow of accumulation. Moreover, I shall be too busy in the college for a year or two yet. It is not the career I should have chosen, and I half think I was made for better things—but I must make the best of it. Between ourselves, I declined lately an offer of $4000 a year from —— to write four pages monthly in——.
“It takes me a good while to be sure I am right. A five or six page notice in the next N. A. R.[45] will have cost me a fortnight’s work of a microscopic kind. My pay must be in a sense of honest thoroughness.”
Lowell lectured in the spring of 1870 at Baltimore, and before the students of Cornell University. In the summer he enjoyed much making the personal acquaintance of Thomas Hughes, who visited America at this time. Lowell had known him by correspondence, and Hughes, who was an ardent admirer of Lowell and had introduced the “Biglow Papers” to the English public, somewhat embarrassed the author of those poems by quoting from them on all occasions. For his work he gave himself to the reading of old French metrical romances, but the year saw scarcely any product, though at its close he brought together a group of indoor and outdoor studies under the title of “My Study Windows.” “I long to give myself to poetry again,” he writes in October to Miss Norton, “before I am so old that I have only thought and no music left. I can’t say as Milton did, ‘I am growing my wings.’” There is a phrase noting a curious consciousness he had at this time in a letter to Mr. Norton, written 15 October, 1870: “I wrote Jane yesterday a kind of letter, but you must wait till my ships come in before I can write the real thing. I can’t get rid of myself enough when I am worried as I am a good part of the time. It is curious, when I am in company I watch myself as if I were a third person, and hear the sound of my own voice, which I never do in a natural mood. However, I shall come out of it all in good time.”
His old correspondent, Mr. Richard Grant White, published this year his “Words and their Uses,” and wrote to Lowell, asking permission to dedicate the book to him. Lowell replied:—
Elmwood, 2 August, 1870.
My dear Sir,—In the midst of my sallow grass and my leaves crumpled with drought, a little spring seemed to bubble up at my feet in your letter. How could I feel other than pleased and honored with your proposal? I wish only I deserved it better—but anyhow I can’t find it in my heart to wave aside my crown out of modesty, lest Anthony might not offer it again. So I put it on my head with many thanks, consoled with the reflection that a wreath unmerited always avenges itself by looking confoundedly like a foolscap in the eyes of every one but the wearer. So I bow my head meekly to your laurels, and thank you very heartily for an honor as agreeable as it is unexpected. I shall have the satisfaction of knowing that the deserved popularity of your book will carry my name into many a pleasant home where it is now unfamiliar, and if my publisher’s accounts show a better figure hereafter, I shall say it is your doing.
With a very sincere acknowledgment of the obligation you lay upon me to do some credit to your second leaf,
I remain, my dear Sir,
Very cordially yours,
J. R. Lowell.
Richard Grant White, Esq.
After some delays attendant on such business, Lowell was able in the summer of 1871 to make a sale of a portion of the original estate of Elmwood which left him the house and a couple of acres for his home, and an income of four or five thousand dollars a year. It was a modest living, but it cleared his mind of fretting cares. As he wrote to Mr. Stephen: “It is a life-preserver that will keep my head above water, and the swimming I will do for myself.” Of the effect upon his mind he wrote more freely to his friend Mr. Norton: “I cannot tell you how this sense of my regained paradise of Independence enlivens me. It is something I have not felt for years—hardly since I have been a professor. The constant sense of a ball and chain jangling at my heels, and that those who are inexpressibly dear to me were at the risk of my giving satisfaction in an office where what is best in me was too often held in abeyance by an uneasy self-consciousness forced upon me by my position, have been greater hindrances than anybody else can ever know. But now I can draw a full breath of natural air and discarbonate my lungs of the heavy atmosphere of an unnatural confinement. I look forward to my next year’s work with cheerfulness. I am no longer chained to the oar, but a volunteer. Whether I shall recover the wholesome mental unrest which kept me active when I was younger, I know not, but at least I shan’t have to print before I am ready, nor to keep on with the spendthrift habit of splitting up the furniture of my brain to keep the pot boiling.... I mean to come abroad at the end of the next college year, and shall pop in on you some day, bringing a familiar odor, half Cambridge, half pipe. I shall read you my new poem—when it gets written—and bore you with old French in which I am still plunged to the ears. I am become a pretty thorough master of it, and wish I knew the modern lingo half as well.”
“It takes a good while,” he writes to Miss Norton, “to slough off the effect of seventeen years of pedagogy. I am grown learned (after a fashion) and dull. The lead has entered into my soul. But I have great faith in putting the sea between me and the stocks I have been sitting in so long.” He worked steadily at his college duties, with some thought, I suspect, of finishing with his professorial work, the laboriously learned part of his life. The minute, painstaking care to which he gave to the studies which underlay his college work, so evident in the annotation of his books, was after all a severe drain upon a nature that took the greatest delight in imaginative freedom. He seems hardly to have allowed himself any relief. “I have been reading over your book[46] again,” he writes to Mr. Fields, 29 February, 1872, “and found it very interesting and queer. Queer, I say, because it is the first volume I have read for some months later than the XIV. century, and I was a little puzzled at first, like Selkirk when he got back among his own people and heard his own language again. I am glad you have left out the imaginary nephew. One was apt to stumble over him and apologize with a ‘Beg pardon, but really had forgotten you were here.’ These buffers between the reader and the first personal pronoun never lessen the shock, though they are always in the way. But nobody wants them, for egotism does not consist in never so many capital I’s. Moreover, I am persuaded that everybody likes it in his secret heart (as he does garlic), and says he doesn’t for appearances.
“Your Dickens letters are a great deal more interesting than Forster’s for some reason or other. I fancy it is because they are more natural. In writing to Forster, Dickens must have felt that he was writing to his biographer, and had the constraint of sitting before a glass. Indeed, I was very much disappointed in Forster’s volume.[47] It doesn’t leave an agreeable impression, which is surely a fault in biography.
“What a dear old affectionate soul Miss Mitford was! I knew nothing about her before. Even her little vanities are rather pleasant than otherwise. It is surely a delightful gift to be made happy as easily as she.
“We are all busy getting ready for Mabel’s departure. I hate to think of it, though I believe she is as safe as human forethought could make her. Burnett is all I could wish.”
Miss Lowell was married 2 April, 1872, to Mr. Edward Burnett, and went with him to Southboro, Massachusetts, where he was carrying on a dairy and stock farm. Miss Rebecca Lowell died in May, so that the household at Elmwood was in a measure dissolved. Lowell was busy up to the last over the long article on Dante which he contributed to the July North American. He was released from his college work, having resigned his professorship; he let Elmwood to Mr. Aldrich and sailed 9 July for Europe with Mrs. Lowell, to be absent two years.
When Lowell went to Europe in the summer of 1872, he left his college routine behind him; with his new-found liberty, he seemed to find all the expression he cared for in familiar talk with the many friends, old and new, whom he encountered in his travels, and in letters to friends at home and abroad. Once only, as will be seen, did he break into poetry, but the two years of his absence contain so little to add to the record of his production that it seems the natural course, as it is most pleasant to the biographer, to let this holiday in Lowell’s life be told for the most part in his letters. The letters printed by Mr. Norton[48] are not drawn upon, except now and then for a needful phrase.
To Thomas Hughes.
Royal Victoria Hotel, Killarney,
20 July, 1872.
My dear Hughes,—Finding I could land in Queenstown, I did so with most infinite discomfort, and here I am in Ireland, having on my way hither done Blarney Castle which is well-nigh as good as Kenilworth. Here, to my surprise, I find a gigantic new R. C. Cathedral, See of the Bishop of Kerry. However, I am not writing a guide-book. I wish to ask if you are in London, and how long you will remain. I am of two minds,—one to go straight to the Continent, the other to stay a week or two in London in lodgings and see things quietly in that blessed season when everybody is out of town. You I “lot” upon seeing. Will you write me at the Grosvenor Hotel, Chester (where I shall turn up by and by), and let me know? I am not even sure if Parliament have adjourned. Think of it! Just like our Yankee impudence, isn’t it? But the truth is, the last paper I saw was dated 9th July, and I hate to make acquaintance again with the World and its goings-on.
I must run to my breakfast, or rather to Madame, of whom I have visions wandering disconsolate in search of me who am ensconced in the smoking-room, where I happened to see an inkstand last night.
In the hope of seeing you soon,
Affectionately yours always,
J. R. Lowell.
To the Same.
Chester, 28 July, 1872.
Your letter and I arrived here together last night. We shall stay here three or four days to recruit from the Irish accent,—which somehow wearied me wonderfully.
If lodgings may be had by the week, to renew or no at will, you would greatly oblige me by taking plain and inexpensive ones for us, where I can let my cup fill again from a tap that rather dribbles than runs. Travelling, I find, drains. A pleasant landlady I should prefer to splendor. I get more than enough of that in the hotels....
If you should find lodgings, I will engage them, beginning with Friday next. If I once get a perch to which I can return at need, I can take short flights wherever I will, without such heaps of luggage. Will you telegraph or write me here? If no lodgings, tell me of some quiet hotel,—not on the American caravanserai system, whither we can go.
To Miss Grace Norton.
11 Dover Street, Piccadilly,
Aug. 4, 1872.
...Dublin interested me much.... From Dublin to Chester, where we stayed five days, and where Charles Kingsley (who is a canon there) was very kind. We had the advantage of going over the Cathedral with him, and over the town with the chief local antiquary. We fell quite in love with it and with the delightful walk round the walls. We arrived in London night before last.
Affectionately yours,
Llumbago Llowell.
To C. E. Norton.
11 Dover Street, Piccadilly,
13 August, 1872.
Give my love to Grace and relieve the anxiety of her mind by telling her I have found J. H. at the Tavistock Hotel, Covent Garden, where he is Mr. ’Omes. I have tried in vain to get him up hither. He goes to Dresden on Thursday to meet some friends whom he learned to know at the Fosters’ and whom he likes. Then he is coming round slowly to Paris, where we are to meet and decide on plans. Meanwhile I have resolved to stay here till you come, if you come soon enough.[49] If not, I shall cross over to you. I go down to Yorkshire (I mean Cumberland) on Friday or Saturday to see the Storys. I can show Fanny York, Durham, and Fountain’s Abbey on the way,—and Ripon, though I did not think it much twenty years ago. We shall spend a few days with the Storys at “Crosby Lodge on Eden” (which has a pleasant name, as if it stood in a garden of cucumbers), and then work downward through the Lake Country and so back to London. We have very central lodgings here, with what I value above all, a pleasant landlady. Our rooms are very small, but they can be smoked in, being bachelor apartments construed into the dual. As it is not the season, we shall probably have no trouble in getting them again when we come back. Now if you are coming over early in September, you see it would be better for us to stay till you come.
We have been having a very pleasant time thus far, though I have not yet quite got over the feeling of the ball and chain. It will take a good while. I do not know whether I told you I had resigned my professorship? I did so the night before we sailed that there might be no discussion. I found that at any rate my salary ceased during my absence, and so I thought it a good chance. I do not altogether like this matter of the salary. It prevents any professor who has not some private fortune of his own from having any vacation at all.[50] But I am glad it happened so, for it just turned the scale with me in favor of the wiser decision,—as I think it is. I cannot yet get over the dulness it ground into me. I begin to think I am too old ever to shake it wholly off....
We have been seeing all sorts of things (persons are out of town) since we have been here. The Hogarths delight me again, and I have twice seen the Rake’s Progress, which I did not get at when I was here before. Hogarth’s color is as fine as his invention and dramatic powers. He astonishes me always by his soft brilliancy and harmony. I have lots of things to talk over when we meet.
To the Same.
11 Dover Street, Piccadilly,
15 September, 1872.
Here we are back again in our old lodgings, with the nicest of possible landladies, Mrs. Bennett. We spent ten days with the Storys at Crosby Lodge, and while there went to Naworth and Corbie Castles and Lanercost Abbey. Naworth interested me specially as being an old border keep tamed to modern civilities, and I liked the Howards, father and son, more even than their dwelling. On our way north we saw Peterboro, Lincoln, York, Fountain’s Abbey, Ripon, Durham, and Carlisle. My old impression was confirmed, and Durham lords it over all of them in my memory. Again, also, as twenty years ago, the Cumberland people seemed more American in look and manner than other English folk. Our visit with the Storys was very pleasant—for a friendship of forty years’ standing is no common thing—and William is absolutely unchanged. I found that I had grown away from him somewhat, but not in a way to lessen our cordiality, and as always in such cases, I held my tongue on controversial points.
From Cumberland we went right through to Grasmere, lodging at the old Swan Inn (the only one left), which pleased me more than it did Fanny. We drove to Dungeon Ghyll Force and Keswick, and then to Lichfield. Here I had a most amusing evening in the smoking-room, listening to the talk of the city magnates, full of Philisterei, if you will, but with a full Shakespearian flavor and a basis of English good sense that pleased me. From Lichfield through Worcester to Hereford and thence to Gloucester, whose cathedral I liked best on the whole, its centre tower being less squat than the others. But the northern minsters beat ’em.
Thence to Tintern, where we spent four days, doing Ragland meanwhile. From Tintern to Chepstow we took boat down the Wye, and very delightful it was. Thence to Bristol, where we slept, saw St. Mary Radcliffe and the cathedral, and then through to London. The sight of masts at Bristol was a cordial to me, and I thought them the finest trees I had seen in England.
I have not been over well since I have been in England. “Flying gout” I am fain to call it, and I am now drinking Vichy in the hope to make it fly altogether. But it is partly dumps, I fancy, for travelling bores me horribly. I am wretched at not finding a letter from Mabel here, and J. H. and Rowse have vanished, leaving no sign. I shall be all ready to come over so soon as I hear from you. You will find me dull, but honestly willing to brighten. A few days with you will do me infinite good. It is abroad that one truly misses friends. At home one is always expecting them back, and they do half come back in a thousand things that daily recall them. But here!
To the Same.
11 Dover Street, Piccadilly,
20 September, 1872.
...I will take the room at your hotel to begin on Monday, and shall without doubt be in Paris on Monday night at 8.15, according to the railway guide. I can only hope that trains are more punctual in France than here, where I have literally not found one up to time since I landed in Ireland, and often more than an hour behind it....
My gout seems to have left off threatening, though it bullied me well for some weeks, but I have been out of sorts ever since I got here, why I can’t divine. We have had letters from Mabel, in good health and happy, which have done me great good....
To the Same.
Hotel de Lorraine, Rue de Beaune, No. 7,
16 October, 1872.
...We like our new quarters very much.[51] Moreover, our living (vin et bois y compris) costs us about fifty francs a week less than at the Hotel Windsor, and we get a better dinner here for three francs than there for six. Moreover, everything here is French. Even the quarter of the town where we are has an indefinable Gallic flavor like the soupçon of garlic in their cookery. There are three or four regular habitués of the table (dont trois decorés) who seem to be scientific men; at any rate, one is a surgeon, and another who has lots of esprit an avocat, I suspect. On parle toujours et quelquefois tous ensemble, aussi qu’a force d’écouter consciencieusement je m’habitue sans le savoir à la langue. Un beau matin je me trouve parlant à merveille débitant les mots avec toute l’insouciance d’un aqueduc qui n’a pas aucune responsabilité des eaux qu’il verse. Si je veille pendant la nuit, je m’occupe à composer des petits discours qui auraient mis le peu Massillon hors de lui d’envie.
Je ne suis pas encore allé chez M. Littré, mais je te remercie beaucoup pour la lettre et la presenterai en très peu de jours. J’ai acheté une de les plumes d’or que tu m’as louées mais soit la pauvreté du papier (à très bon marché) ou bien des idées, elle refuse de marcher dans une langue aussi facile que doit lui etre la française.
Since your departure, my dear boy, I have bucaneered (’tis a free translation of bouquiné, corresponding to my exploits in turning my native tongue into French—for I like to be consistent) among the stalls, but Fortune packed her trunk (the baggage!) at the same time with you, and I have not prospered much. One attribute of deity I have not arrogated presumptuously but enjoy by a privilege of nature, to wit (à savoir), that of confounding the counsels of the wicked, for I puzzle the dealers awfully now and then with my discours. I suppose it must be that I inadvertently mix in too much of l’ancien Français. ’Tis as if one should talk pure Chaucer to Burnham.[52] However, I bought the seventeen volume Byron for $40, and have sent it to my grandson’s (I mean Petit fils—you see how I am getting translated) to be bound. If it were not for this confounded pen (saving your reverence) I would write you a cheerful letter—but what can one do when it takes so long to write the first half of a sentence that one forgets the last? I assure you I had several clever things to say, but they are stuck in my pen—a very unfortunate position of things, because you will see they have gone out of my head....
To the Same.
Paris, 1 November, 1872.
...Now for bouquiniste news. I think I did not tell you that I had picked up a splendid quarto (with fine port) of Montaigne’s Travels. It is a beauty. Also Nouveaux Memoires pour servir à l’histoire du Cartesianisme, a tiny tome in vellum with Ste. Beuve’s autograph and pencil marks. Best of all, I got at an auction Le Chevalier au Cigne, which I have long vainly sought, four volumes quarto demi mar. for $33.50. I should not have thought it dear at a hundred. I am going out presently after a copy of the Poètes Champenois, which I have found at Aubry’s, for $180. Pillet asked $350 for an incomplete set. After this last extravagance I shall retire from business for a while, for I am getting beyond my depth. Aubry has a copy of Renard bound for $40. Shall I buy it for you? It includes Chabaillé’s supplementary fifth volume....
We are having a nice time, though I felt like Dante when he turned round and missed Virgil, when I found that Rowse had flown. However, three days after John [Holmes] arrived in excellent health and spirits—likes our hotel, and will stay ad libitum. His knee is not quite right, but otherwise he is robustious. He confided to me yesterday that the first time we walked out, he wished me to guide him to where he could get some oysters! He thought they would quite set him up. He is very droll with his German, and delightful to the last degree. In French he is as inarticulate as one of his favorite shell-fish. We have a little woman who comes to talk with us an hour a day, and so soon as I get fluid I am going to Littré. I already enter into conversation at table with gusto.
To the Same.
Paris, 14 November, 1872.
...I am very glad you sent the Emersons to me. I have engaged him a lovely little apartment au premier at 8 frs. the day. I think I shall take it myself when they go, for I am more and more minded to stay the winter through. We are all well and send lots of love to all of you. Fanny is at work on French exercises all day, and as for me, when I get my French suit of clothes I shall be a thorough Gaul. I am ready for a revolution (or at any rate an e mute) to-morrow. It is pretty chilly here now, and I almost wish the Commune had put off their bonfires till the middle of November, when they would have done some good. I am writing on a marble table, and my fingers are numb as gutta percha.
To the Same.
Paris, 6 December, 1872.
There has been an untoward gap in my correspondence, because I have fallen back a little into home habits, and have been pegging away at Old French again.... But the days are so short! and it has been such gloomy weather. Fifty-seven days of rain, think of it, and the only excitement the crue of the Seine. Yes, we are beginning to have another, for we are threatened with a revolution. The Right are resolved to push things to extremes, and would rather have a military triumvirate than Thiers with a ministry of his own choosing. The French look upon Paris as the metropolis of the world, but I am more and more struck with a certain provincialism of mind shown in the importance they attach to their own personality. Every one of them has the flavor of a village great man. It is not individuality I mean, but value of self. No man can bring himself to get out of the way, even though it is the country he is blocking. I pick up a good deal at my table d’hôte and am more and more pleased with it.
I have not yet been to call on Littré, but I shall before long. My French still refuses to go trippingly from my tongue. However, I manage now to converse at table, and plunge into general discussion bravely. In the intervals of the rain (for it does not always rain all day long, though it rains every day) I take long walks in every direction, and am grown pretty intimate with Paris. I still like it and the people. By the way, Clarice (the maid who waits at breakfast) said to me this morning: “Les aristocrats ne veulent pas que la basse classe soit instruite. Ils croient que le peuple sait trop déja. Avec la République nous aurions l’instruction obligatoire. Ah, ce serait une chose très bonne pour nous.” I am inclined to believe that the people know more than my friend, the Marquis de Grammont, thinks!
To the Same.
Paris, 11 January, 1873.
...My life runs on in the same canal. A walk before breakfast round the parallelogram formed by the Pont de Solferino at one end and the Pont des Arts at the other, then a walk after breakfast with John up to the Pont Neuf and across to the courtyard of the Tuileries where we sit and collogue over our cigars, feeding the sparrows between whiles; then home, and John to Schiller’s Thirty Years’ War and I to my Old French. In the dusk I generally take a longer walk by myself, or else the same one with John. I have got a whole closet full of books, and have reached the end of my tether, having just received an account from the Barings showing that I have overdrawn £104. However, the books are a kind of investment. But I begin to foresee that I shall not stay abroad so long as I expected. I thought I was all right now, but as usual my income is never so large as my auguries. Fortunately, I like Cambridge better than any other spot of the earth’s surface, and if I can only manage to live there shall be at ease yet....
To the Same.
Paris, 18 March, 1873.
...I shall probably be in England before you go, for Hughes writes me (this is between ourselves) that there is a chance of their giving me a D. C. L. at Oxford, which I should like. I am not, I think, overfond of decorations, but I should like this one, for I cannot get over a superstitious respect for what goes into the college triennial catalogue.
To Thomas Hughes.
Paris, 19 March, 1873.
...What you say of the quiet lives that would come to the front in England in a time of stress, I believe to be true of us also. I cannot think such a character as Emerson’s—one of the simplest and noblest I have ever known—a freak of chance, and I hope that my feeling that the country is growing worse is nothing more than men of my age have always felt when they looked back to the tempus actum.... If I had dreamed you would have run over to Paris, wouldn’t I have told you where I was! But, in fact, I have lingered on here from week to week aimlessly, having come abroad to do nothing, and having thus far succeeded admirably.
To Leslie Stephen.
Paris, 29 April, 1873.
...I think I have made up my mind to run over to London for a day or two, to bid the Nortons good-by, for I cannot bear to have the sea between us before I see them again. If I do, I shall arrive about the 7th of May, and I shall count on seeing you as much as possible.... I have read your “Are we Christians?” and liked it, of course, because I found you in it, and that is something that will be dear to me so long as I keep my wits. I think I should say that you lump shams and conventions too solidly together in a common condemnation. All conventions are not shams by a good deal, and we should soon be Papuans without them. But I dare say I have misunderstood you.
To the Same.
Paris, 3 May, 1873.
I shall arrive Monday night, and have taken a chamber at the Queen’s Hotel, which is described to me as “somewhere behind the Burlington Arcade,” which is tolerably central. I shall not think of billeting myself on you, especially as you are not yet fairly settled. But I wish to see as much of you as may be. I must see your new nest as I did the old one, for that was a great satisfaction to me, and I recall it often in fancy. I must make the acquaintance of Miss Laura, too, in whom I feel an added interest now that I have got my step, and am a grandfather.[53] You would laugh at the number of perambulators (as they call baby-wagons nowadays) and ponies that I have bought for that wonderful boy, as I lie awake at night and hear the tramp of the sergent de ville under my windows. I have carried him through college so many times, that he must be a prodigy of learning by this time. I do not know whether I ought to betray it even to you, but he has more than once shown a tendency to be fast, though I have reclaimed him. I am quite sure he is steady now, and does not drink more than is good for him. That story of the police court was much exaggerated.
I don’t wonder that you feel sad at the thought of losing the Nortons. They have been and are more to me than I can tell. But you will see them all again, when you come to make your visit to me, which I look upon as pledged. It is as easy to get to us as to Switzerland, and you shall sleep now and then in the ice-chest to make you comfortable. The roof of the barn is pretty slippery and the ground below hard enough to give you a smart Alpine shock. By the way, what you say about Switzerland in July delights me. Remember that my address is always to the care of the Barings, and let me know where you are to be and when. I have a sort of glimmering of Lausanne, where I could exist cheaply, for though on pleasure I am bent, I am forced to have a frugal mind. But I am more and more convinced that a man (especially a grandfather) is most comfortable when he has worn his ruts deepest, and I should fly over the deep to-morrow if I could. It is ignoble, but it is true. I always hated the sights qu’il faut voir, and now there is no hope of strangeness anywhere. Man is a most uninventive animal—you scratch through the nationality and there he is underneath—the very bore you were running away from. However, I am rested and grown so stout that I have positively had to let out a reef in my trousers.
I reckon on a very jolly time in London, because I shall always be in the tremor of going away—though I am almost sorry that I am going when I think of saying good-by to the Nortons. I am sorry you did not see more of Emerson; he is good to love, and if his head be sometimes in thin and difficult air, his heart never is. He must have left London, then? Gay told me he met you at the Nortons, and kept calling you Stevens, and I irascibly correcting him as I would a vicious proofsheet. I don’t know why, but I am always exasperated when anybody pluralizes you. Whether it is that I hold you to be unique, or that I was once cheated by a man named Stevens, I can’t tell. However, Gay is a good fellow and a good artist for all that. Why is it that people do so? They always call Child Childs in the same fashion.
My eyes gave out some time ago, so I will only say that I shall go straight to Cleveland Place Tuesday morning, and if you dropt in on your way down town, it would be the best possible world so long as it lasted.
To C. E. Norton.
(Passenger by “Olympus.”)
Paris, 13 May, 1873.
I am so wont to carry Home about with me and to say “here,” when I mean Cambridge, even in Paris, that I did not fairly realize to myself that you were all going away till I was meditating over my pipe on board the Channel steamer. I made up my mind that I would fling an old shoe after you in the shape of a good-by that should surprise you after you were fairly embarked. I need not say how happy my three days with you in London were, nor how sweet it was to renew the old, old friendship with you all. We don’t make new friends, at least not in the same sense, for it is the privilege of old friendship that it knows all our weaknesses and accounts for them beforehand, taking almost a kind of pleasure in them as we do in bad weather that we have prophesied.
I wish I could have gone with you to Oxford, but Fanny was so happy at seeing me a day sooner than she expected that I was glad I didn’t. However, I made a memorandum never to leave her behind again in future.... They had taken good care of her while I was away, for somehow or other everybody in the house is fond of her.
The best wish I can make for you is that every day of your passage may be as fine as this which is a mixture of all that is sweetest in spring time. May the dry masts of your steamer be covered with leaves and flowers like Joseph’s rod, and may the porpoises gamble about you for the children’s sake....
My heart is fuller than I dreamed of with this parting, but it is not foreboding I am sure. I shall find you all again after many days, and we shall have many happy hours together....
To T. B. Aldrich.
Paris, 28 May, 1873.
...I shall stay out my two years, though personally I would rather be at home. In certain ways this side is more agreeable to my tastes than the other,—but even the buttercups stare at me as a stranger and the birds have a foreign accent....
Before this reaches you I shall have been over to Oxford to get a D. C. L. So by the time you get it this will be the letter of a Doctor and entitled to the more respect. Perhaps, in order to get the full flavor, you had better read this passage first, if you happen to think of it. Do you not detect a certain flavor of parchment and Civil Law?...
To Thomas Hughes.
Paris, 2 June, 1873.
...We shall leave Paris to-morrow or next day, stopping in Rheims to see the churches, at Louvain for the Town House, and so on to Antwerp, Ghent, and Bruges.... If I don’t see you in Oxford, I shall stop long enough in London to get a glimpse of you. Our plan is to go to Switzerland and Germany, and so down to Italy for the winter. Then back to Paris, and so over to England on our way home next year. I hate travelling with my whole soul, though I like well enough to “be” in places....
To Mrs. Lewis A. Stimson.
Bruges, 25 June, 1873.
...I have been over to Oxford to be doctored, and had a very pleasant time of it. You would respect me if you could have seen me in my scarlet gown.... We go from here in a day or two to Holland—then up the Rhine to Switzerland, where we join the Stephens and Miss Thackeray.
To C. E. Norton.
Venice, 30 October, 1873.
...Since we left Bruges, we have been up the Rhine, and then across to Nürnberg, where we spent a fortnight in great contentment. Before this, however, we had made a pretty good giro in the Low Countries, going wherever there was a good cathedral or Town Hall.... When we reached Geneva we found ourselves so comfortable that we stayed two months and did some reading. I liked the town, and especially the walks in its neighborhood, very much. Then we went to Chamonix, and then over the Simplon to the Italian lakes, whence we came hither. Venice charms me more than ever. We keep a gondola and go about leisurely seeing all the lovely things.... The weather has not been very good, but there has been only one day when we could not go out in the gondola without the coperto, either toward the Lido or over the lagunes to watch the sunset, or through the smaller canals to find that the very back lanes of Venice are finer than the highstreets anywhere else....
I am recovering a little facility in Italian—to be lost again when I get beyond the daily sound of it. I give Fanny a lesson every day in the Promessi Sposi, which has so often served as a go-cart to those who are learning to take their first steps in the language. She reads aloud to me, so that I save my eyes and practise my ears at the same time. She is a very good scholar for she puts zeal into whatever she does, and is making great progress. It is odd to me how the familiar phrases cling round my brain like bats to the roof of a cage, and are set flying all of a sudden by a chance footfall. I am very much struck, by the way, to find how much more vividly I remember the Venetian pictures than any others. I can’t help thinking it implies a peculiar merit in them. I recall them as I do natural objects—the Staubbach for example, or Hogarth....
To Thomas Hughes.