On New Year’s Day, 1882, Lowell sent another poem, “Estrangement,” to Mr. Gilder for the Century. “I am pleased,” he wrote, “that you liked the little poem I sent you, and the more that you asked for another. Here is one you are welcome to, if you like it. I rather do, but that is nothing, and I shall like you none the less if you don’t. Treat me like a gentleman and not like a poet,—I mean as you would a gentleman and not a poet. I am tough and have myself played Herod to many an infant muse, and mine is approaching her second childhood.”

His social life drew from him occasional verses, as when he planted a tree at Inverary, or thanked Miss Dorothy Tennant, who afterward married Henry M. Stanley, for a drawing of little street Arabs, or sent a sonnet home in honor of Whittier’s seventy-fifth birthday, or gave a posset cup to a god-child. He was happy in pleasing young friends with verses, sometimes inserting them in books which he gave them, or writing them in their albums.

Early in 1882 he was saddened by the sudden death of R. H. Dana, one of the earliest of his friends and lately fresh in his recollection since he had seen much of him in his recent stay in Rome. “We had known each other,” he wrote to Mr. George Putnam, “at least fifty-five years. He is a great loss, and the more that his career was incomplete. He never filled the place he ought in public affairs. One weakness neutralized the legitimate effect of his very remarkable abilities. Death seems to be hitting right and left among my contemporaries. So far as I am concerned, I take the warning with perfect equanimity.” It was somewhat in the same mood that he wrote to his friend Field: “I have no news except that for about a week I have been having a head again. I have temporarily reformed and live cleanly like Falstaff. No wine, no black coffee, and—you won’t believe it, but ’tis true—no baccy till afternoon and then a short allowance. You see I am in earnest. At the same time that I take these precautions I confess that I don’t hanker arter much more of this world, and shouldn’t mind much if—. I notice that the men in my platoon are dropping right and left. I wish I relished life as much as you. Give my love to——, who will see by the way I spell her name that I am in good humor though I feel as if I had Luke’s iron crown on.”

He was drawn in colored chalks at this time by Mr. Sandys, and another portrait also was painted by Mrs. Merritt, which now hangs in the Faculty Room in University Hall at Harvard. “I am off for private view at Academy,” he writes to Mr. Field, 28 April, 1882; “two portraits of myself there. They are very unlike each other, and my duty to the artist requires me to try and look as much like each as I can. What am I to do? They will be in different rooms doubtless, and so I can manage it perhaps.”

It was a light matter to toy with verse now and then, but as for prose, the most be attempted beyond his despatches to his government were the speeches he made now and then. Mr. Aldrich had asked for a paper on a certain subject for the Atlantic, and he replied, 8 May, 1882: “If I could, how gladly I would! But I am piece-mealed here with so many things to do that I cannot get a moment to brood over anything, as it must be brooded over if it is to have wings. It is as if a setting hen should have to mind the doorbell. Now, you must wait till I come home to be Boycotted in my birthplace by my Irish fellow-citizens (who are kind enough to teach me how to be American) who fought all our battles and got up all our draft-riots. Then, in the intervals of firing through my loopholes of retreat I may be able to do something for the Atlantic. I am now in the midst of the highly important and engrossing business of arranging for the presentation at Court of some of our fair citoyennes. Whatever else you are, never be a minister!” Mr. Bowker relates of Lowell that “at one time he had given offence to an American lady of doubtful reputation, who had asked him to present her at Court, and on his dexterously evading that responsibility, had asked him point blank whether he was unwilling because he had heard certain things about her. He could not answer in the negative, and she went off vowing vengeance. A few months afterwards, when the Irish criticisms were hottest, she reappeared and had the effrontery to tell him that she had stirred up the whole business herself, out of revenge. Mr. Lowell added, on telling this story, that he proposed to accomplish at least one thing, to keep his country respectable, even if he had to resign to do it.”

One of the most admirable of his little speeches was that on unveiling the bust of Fielding at Taunton, 4 September, 1883. He spoke as an author, as one who had reflected upon the great office of literature, and as a critic who could measure Fielding’s power by the standard of Shakespeare and Cervantes, and perhaps even more effectively as one of the English race who was enough differentiated by his American birth, and enough instructed by his familiarity with racy men of the soil, to appreciate the essential English manliness of the great writer. This address is indeed one of the most striking commentaries on the fitness of Lowell to act as a spokesman for the common Englishry of two countries. His point of view was at once that of an onlooker and of one indigenous. Three years later, when reprinting the address in his volume “Democracy and other Addresses,” he refers to one passage in the speech as follows: “I am constantly bothered by the disenchanting effect of my sense of humor (of which I speak in the Fielding address) which makes me too fair to both sides. This often makes me distrustful of myself. I am sometimes inclined to call Genius not ‘an infinite capacity for taking pains’ (though that is much), but an infinite capacity for being one-sided.”

There was a somewhat humorous episode in Lowell’s career in the autumn of 1883. It is a time-honored custom at the ancient and sturdy little University of St. Andrews for the student body to elect once a year a Lord Rector of the University whose duties are limited to a single address. There is a tacit understanding that politics shall not enter into the election, and that the choice shall be the students’ own, without interference from the officers of the faculty. This does not of course preclude an interest on the part of professors, and Shairp, Campbell, and Baynes especially took a lively interest in the proposal that Lowell should succeed Sir Theodore Martin. At first Mr. Mallock appeared as opposition candidate, but his name was withdrawn when it was found that he had been set up by some indiscreet person with a view to bettering his chances for Parliament, and the Right Hon. Edward Gibson was proposed. A protest was lodged against Lowell’s nomination on the ground that he was an alien. The whole business created a lively discussion in and out of print, and Punch entered the lists with these lines:—

The excitement ran high, and Lowell was elected by a considerable majority. But his opponents pushed the matter further, and demonstrated that he was really ineligible by reason of his “extra-territoriality.” As Lowell put it in writing to Professor Child: “My official extra-territoriality will, perhaps, prevent my being rector at St. Andrews, because it puts me beyond the reach of the Scottish Courts in case of malversation in office. How to rob a Scottish University suggests a serious problem.” To avoid further complications Lowell resigned. He good-humoredly told his friends at home that his only regret was in being prevented from adding the dignified line “Univ. Sanct. Andr-Scot-Dom. Rect.” to his name in the Harvard catalogue. His student friends could do nothing but accept the situation. Later, they begged him, when they knew he was to be at St. Andrews, to address them unofficially. It was not long before the expiration of his term as American minister, and he wrote, 27 January, 1885:—

“Circumstances over which I have no control will prevent my being with you at St. Andrews next Friday. I feel deeply touched by the continued kindness of the students of your ancient University, and greatly honored by their wish to see me and hear me. I am somewhat consoled in my disappointment by the reflection that neither your eyes nor your ears will lose so much as is kindly implied by the invitation with which you have honored me. It is I who miss a pleasure whose loss I shall always regret; for young friends have a charm and value of their own, as he feels most sensibly who has reached a period in life when old ones are only too frequently saying good-by forever.”

When the commotion over the rectorship was going on, Lowell was having a holiday in Paris, where he was able to take Mrs. Lowell for a couple of months. An anonymous writer in the Atlantic Monthly,[88] who saw the Lowells at this time, has recorded some impressions created by Lowell’s conversation, and among them one respecting his interest in the Jewish race. When he was writing his paper on Rousseau, his interest was awakened, and the interest took a personal turn as he associated his own family name of Russell with that of the French philosopher. He was led to enquire into the representation of the race in America, and no doubt his interest was heightened by his sojourn in Spain. But it was after he went to England, where be had manifold opportunities for making observations, that the whole subject of the Jewish element in society came to be a very frequent topic of conversation with him. It was just such a subject as would appeal to his love of paradox, his subtle curiosity, and his liking for brilliant forays into new territory. It does not appear that Lowell ever set down in writing his deliberate convictions. Rather he kept this theme for the pastime of conversation, driving the ball indeed at times with an energy which would suggest the professional athlete.

“One evening,” says the writer in the Atlantic, “I was dining with Mr. and Mrs. Lowell and three other friends, and he began to lament the renaming of old streets which was going on, and the obliteration of the last traces of the Paris of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries,—the Paris of the schoolmen and their open-air debates. He spoke of the local history that lay in the mere names of streets and squares,—Rue du Fouarre, Rue des Gauvais Garçons, and several more of which he gave the origin and legend. In the midst of this picturesque and learned disquisition he stumbled upon the class of a celebrated philosopher of those times, seated on their bundles of straw,—a well-known teacher whose name I cannot now recall,—and stated that he was a Jew.

“He instantly began to talk of the Jews, a subject which turned out to be almost a monomania with him. He detected a Jew in every hiding-place and under every disguise, even when the fugitive had no suspicion of himself. To begin with nomenclature: all persons named for countries or towns are Jews; all with fantastic, compound names, such as Lilienthal, Morgenroth; all with names derived from colors, trades, animals, vegetables, minerals; all with Biblical names, except Puritan first names; all patronymics ending in son,—sohn, sen, or any other version; all Russels, originally so called from red-haired Israelites; all Walters, by long descended derivation from wolves and foxes in some ancient tongue; the therefore Cecilia Metella, no doubt St. Cecilia too, consequently the Cecils, including Lord Burleigh and Lord Salisbury; he cited some old chronicle in which he had cornered one Robert de Cæcilia and exposed him as an English Jew. He gave examples and instances of these various classes with amazing readiness and precision, but I will not pretend that I have set down even these few correctly. Of course there was Jewish blood in many royal houses and in most noble ones, notably in Spain. In short, it appeared that this insidious race had and permeated the human family more universally than any other influence except original sin. He spoke of their talent and versatility, and of the numbers who had been illustrious in literature, the learned professions, art, science, and even war, until by degrees, from being shut out of society and every honorable and desirable pursuit, they had gained the prominent positions everywhere.

“Then he began his classifications again: all bankers were Jews, likewise brokers, most of the great financiers,—and that was to be expected; the majority of barons, also baronets; they had got possession of the press, they were getting into politics; they had forced their entrance into the army and navy; they had made their way into the cabinets of Europe and become prime ministers; they had slipped into diplomacy and become ambassadors. But a short time ago they were packed into the Ghetto: now they inhabited palaces, the most aristocratic quarters, and were members of the most exclusive clubs. A few years ago they could not own land; they were acquiring it by purchase and mortgage in every part of Europe, and buying so many old estates in England that they owned the larger part of several counties.

“Mr. Lowell said more, much more, to illustrate the ubiquity, the universal ability of the Hebrew, and gave examples and statistics for every statement, however astonishing, drawn from his inexhaustible information. He was conscious of the sort of infatuation which possessed him, and his dissertation alternated between earnestness and drollery; but whenever a burst of laughter greeted some new development of his theme, although he joined in it, he immediately returned to the charge with abundant proof of his paradoxes. Finally he came to a stop, but not to a conclusion, and as no one else spoke, I said, ‘And when the Jews have got absolute control of finance, the army and navy, the press, diplomacy, society, titles, the government, and the earth’s surface, what do you suppose they will do with them and with us?’ ‘That,’ he answered, turning towards me, and in a whisper audible to the whole table, ‘that is the question which will eventually drive me mad.’”

On the return of the Lowells from Paris to London they moved into a larger and more commodious house still in Lowndes Square, but No. 31. “We have been having a mild winter,” Lowell writes to Mr. Field, 19 January, 1884, “with only a couple of days or so of frost thus far. Everything is looking as green as summer (by everything I mean the grass in the Parks) and the thrushes are using up all their best songs before the curtain of spring rises. The Season hasn’t begun yet, but I am dining out more or less as usual. Fanny goes too sometimes, but can’t stand much of it. You will have seen that I have resigned my rectorship, but I was at once chosen president of the Birmingham and Midland Institute so that I might have another chair to sit down in.”

It was in the double office of American minister and poet that he took part in the ceremonies attending the unveiling of the bust of Longfellow in Westminster Abbey, 2 March, 1884. But the personal relation which he bore the poet was uppermost in his mind, especially as he was renewing his intercourse with the family in the person of two of Longfellow’s daughters who were living in England at this time and were present at the unveiling. The occasion was not one for critical judgment, but in the course of his brief speech he made a felicitous point on sonnet writing. “I have been struck particularly,” he said, “with this quality of style in some of my late friend’s sonnets, which seem to me in unity and evenness of flow among the most beautiful and perfect we have in the language. They remind one of those cabinets in which all the drawers are opened at once by the turn of the key in a single lock, whereas we all have seen sonnets with a lock in every line with a different key to each, and the added conundrums of secret drawers.”

In April came the tercentenary commemoration of the University of Edinburgh, when Lowell was present and received the degree of Doctor of Laws. The same degree was conferred on him at his own University a few weeks later.

In May he was called on for two addresses. On the seventh of the month he attended the annual dinner of the Provincial Newspaper Society at the Inns of Court Hotel, London, and a few words which he then said, because spoken apparently without premeditation, are worth recording as expressing a judgment held by him with great sincerity. “I have my own theory,” he said, “as to what after-dinner speaking should be. I think it should be in the first place short; I think it should be light; and I think it should be both extemporaneous and contemporaneous. I think it should have the meaning of the moment in it, and nothing more. But I confess that when I get up here and face you, representing what you call the Provincial Press—and if you will allow me by way of an interjection, I may state that it has been my fortune to live in a number of countries, where it has sometimes been my duty to study the National Press, and I have always and everywhere found it provincial: I have never yet encountered a truly cosmopolitan newspaper—when I feel myself standing for the first time in the presence of a collection of editors, I experience a very serious emotion. I feel as if I were talking to the ear of Dionysius, at the other end of which the world was listening. I do not see any reporters here—I am glad I do not. I cannot help taking this opportunity, with so many persons who have the formation of public opinion before me, of saying one or two words on the growing change which has taken place in the methods of forming public opinion. I am not sure that you are always aware to how great an extent you have supplanted the pulpit, to how great an extent you have supplanted even the deliberative assembly. You have assumed responsibilities, I should say, heavier than man ever assumed before. You wield an influence entirely without precedent hitherto in human history. I do not wish the dinner to be too solemn, but, as I tell you, I have been solemnized standing in this presence. I came here intending only to say a few words of kindly thanks for the friendliness which you have shown toward the country I have the honor to represent, and to me as representing it. But, I cannot forbear to say that, if I were an editor, I should have written up in the room in which I write, ‘Woe to me if I preach not the gospel:’ I mean so much of the Word of God as is manifest to me, and I should strive to preach that word, and to convey it to my fellow-men. I have always thought the case of clergymen a hard one, because they are expected to be inspired once a week. But what is this to yours who must be inspired every day, and who have undertaken to edit the whole world every morning? There has been nothing, as I was just saying, that has, in the history of man, occupied such a position as the Press. You have the formation of public opinion. There is not a man here who values any more than I do, or ever have done, the opinion of Tom, or the opinion of Dick, or the opinion of Harry. But when Tom, Dick, and Harry agree, then we begin to call it public opinion. I am not sure that it always deserves that name; but I am sure of this, that public opinion is of value in precise proportion to the material it is made of. I am sure of this, that two factors go towards the making of that material. One is the editor, and the other is the reader.”

Three days later, 10 May, 1884, he delivered, as president of the Wordsworth Society, the address on that poet which is included in his “Literary and Political Addresses.” He deprecated the notion that he could add materially to what he had written of Wordsworth in his more deliberate earlier paper,[89] for as he says: “Without unbroken time there can be no consecutive thought, and it is my misfortune that in the midst of a reflection or of a sentence I am liable to be called away by the bell of private or public duty.” The speech contains one or two critical passages which may be added to the sum of Lowell’s comment on Wordsworth; but to the student of Lowell’s mind as affected by new conditions and registering itself in new terms, the speech is more interesting because of the main thought in it, that which occupies him upon passing in review the work of Dr. Knight who had by his new edition of the poet enabled the student to perceive more clearly the development of Wordsworth’s thought. Precisely that examination which we are desirous of making of Lowell, Lowell set out to make of Wordsworth; but the eye of the student reveals something of the mind that prompts the eye’s excursion, and Lowell was in a way suggesting the movement of his own thought when, upon enquiring what was the solution by which Wordsworth attempted as he grew in years to justify his own early radicalism with his later conservatism, he found a very powerful influence in that religious conception which dominated Wordsworth’s later thought. “I see no reason to think,” he says, “that he ever swerved from his early faith in the beneficence of freedom, but rather that he learned the necessity of defining more exactly in what freedom consisted, and the conditions, whether of time or place, under which alone it can be beneficent, of insisting that it must be an evolution and not a manufacture, and that it should coördinate itself with the prior claims of society and civilization.” But the roots of freedom were planted in the individual nature, and there they were to be nourished. Development of character—yes, but by what means? “Observation convinced him that what are called the safeguards of society are the staff also of the individual members of it; that tradition, habitude, and heredity are great forces, whether for impulse or restraint. He had pondered a pregnant phrase of the poet Daniel, where he calls religion ‘mother of Form and Fear.’ A growing conviction of its profound truth turned his mind towards the church as the embodiment of the most potent of all traditions, and to her public offices as the expression of the most socially humanizing of all habitudes.”

Lowell was analyzing Wordsworth’s poetry with a view to reaching definite understanding of the principles which prompted it, and especially which led to the gradual yet none the less sure change in the philosophy of the poetry. I think in the whole interesting discussion which Lowell here entered upon one may read his own mind, more or less conscious of change in its attitude and finding in the mirror of another poet some image of itself. In becoming wonted to English life, Lowell was lessening a certain protest against institutional religion which was characteristic of the community into which he was born, and had been a part of his own intellectual and moral expression. In a letter to Mrs. Herrick written in 1875, he had answered a question of hers regarding his religious faith:—

“You ask me if I am an Episcopalian. No, though I prefer the service of the Church of England, and attend it from time to time. But I am not much of a church-goer, because I so seldom find any preaching that does not make me impatient and do me more harm than good. I confess to a strong lurch towards Calvinism (in some of its doctrines) that strengthens as I grow older. Perhaps it may be some consolation to you that my mother was born and bred an Episcopalian.”

In this passage Lowell betrays very naturally his New England mind. He inherited the prevailing notion that the Episcopal Church was an exotic,—he speaks of attending the service of the Church of England, when he probably is thinking of his occasional visits with his daughter to Christ Church in his own Cambridge; and he could not help looking upon the sermon as the central point in religious worship. But the preference which he had for the service was easily strengthened by association with it where it was the rule and not the exception; not only so, but that observation which he used so keenly showed him in England the existence of a highly organized society, very congenial to him, in which not only was church-going a matter of course, but religion as a spirit was not dissociated from the forms of worship, rather it was thought of largely in those terms. Hence it was that Lowell in adjusting himself as he did to the life about him was undergoing more or less conscious a change in the attitude of his mind toward the whole field of religion.

To some this would seem an indication that Lowell was becoming Anglicized. But how confidently could this be asserted of his political faith? That was a very integral part of his nature. From youth to age he had declared and reiterated his faith in freedom, in the largest liberty, and especially in that political equality which was the basis of all that was holiest and most enduring in the America of which he was so passionate a lover,—the America which he saw in a vision, and was able to see even through the vapors which might rise from mephitic ground. When the autumn of 1884 came, the political signs pointed to a change of party in the administration of government at home, and in the event of an accession to power of the Democratic party, it was plain that Lowell would be recalled from his post as minister near the Court of St. James. Four years of friendly intercourse with Englishmen and Englishwomen, of a somewhat more intimate acquaintance with the springs of government than falls to the lot of the mere looker-on; not only that, but the advantage which an alienated American has of viewing his country from a new vantage ground, for distance in space has some of the properties of distance in time, and an American in Europe has almost the point of view of an American of the next century,—all this may well have led Lowell to reflect on the fundamentals of politics, and have served to give point to his reflections when he came to give the address expected of the incoming president of the Birmingham and Midland Institute. Moreover, the place where he was to speak reminded him of that great industrial factor which enters so powerfully into modern conceptions of the state.

It is fair, therefore, to take his address on Democracy, given 6 October, 1884, as a careful and deliberate expression of his political faith. Yet it must be borne in mind that he was somewhat hampered by his official position as well as inspired by it. He stood for the great democratic country, was its spokesman, but he was not speaking to his own countrymen, and might easily be misconstrued by foreigners if he attempted to weigh Democracy in balances designed for apothecaries’ stuff, and not for hay wagons. As he himself said four years later: “I was called upon to deliver an address in Birmingham, and chose for my theme ‘Democracy.’ In that place I felt it incumbent on me to dwell on the good points and favorable aspects of democracy as I had seen them practically illustrated in my native land. I chose rather that my discourse should suffer through inadequacy than run the risk of seeming to forget what Burke calls ‘that salutary prejudice called our country,’ and that obligation which forbids one to discuss family affairs before strangers. But here among ourselves it is clearly the duty of whoever loves his country to be watchful of whatever weaknesses and perils there may be in the practical working of a system never before set in motion under such favorable auspices, or on so large a scale.”[90]

One need not be nicer than his author, and it is clear from what Lowell wrote afterward that he was somewhat surprised at the importance attached to this utterance at Birmingham. In truth, it was the natural and in a measure the unstudied expression of a man whose convictions were not lightly held, had been tested by long experience, and were the warp and woof of his political loom. Studied the address was, so far as it became him not to disregard his official self, and above all not to suffer his creed to be modified by his surroundings; but, bating all this, the speech was the mellow judgment of a man who was about to retire from a post where he had been an intermediary between the two freest nations on earth, and it represented his deliberate thought upon the foundations of that freedom.

He strikes the keynote of his discourse in his opening sentence: “He must be a born leader or misleader of men, or must have been sent into the world unfurnished with that modulating and restraining balance-wheel which we call a sense of humor, who, in old age, has as strong a confidence in his opinions and in the necessity of bringing the universe into conformity with them as he had in youth.” Here was Lowell, not unmindful of the zeal of his youth, standing up in the serenity of age and about to repeat his credo in accents which could not be the self-same as those with which he had early sung. Wherein, then, does “Democracy” disclose essential agreement with its author’s ardent faith in youth, or departure from the ideals then enjoyed? The one note always struck by Lowell when he was singing of freedom and democracy was that of the impregnable defence of these great truths in free and conscience-governed character, and it is this note with which his address concludes: “Our healing is not in the storm or in the whirlwind, it is not in monarchies, or aristocracies, or democracies, but will be revealed by the still small voice that speaks to the conscience and the heart, prompting us to a wider and wiser humanity.” And in testing current views by his unalterable faith in humanity, he cleaves with no uncertain stroke. At the time of his address Henry George’s doctrine was preached by its most eloquent expounder, Henry George himself, and Lowell says frankly: “I do not believe that land should be divided because the quantity of it is limited by nature,” but a moment after, “Mr. George is right in his impelling motive; right, also, I am convinced, in insisting that humanity makes a part, by far the most important part, of political economy.” So, too, he distinguishes at once between a socialism which means “the practical application of Christianity to life, and has in it the secret of an orderly and benign reconstruction,” and State Socialism, whose disposition is to “cut off the very roots in personal character—self-help, forethought, and frugality—which nourish and sustain the trunk and branches of every vigorous commonwealth.”

What strikes one as most final in this discourse as an exponent of Lowell’s attitude is his thinking through to the substance of things and his indifference to names or to terms except as they define realities. “Democracy in its best sense,” he declares, “is merely the letting in of light and air.” He never did believe in violent changes; in his most ardent crusade against the gigantic evil of slavery, he refused to go with his associates who were ready to sever a union which seemed to protect slavery. But with growing age it may be said that he was more averse to any change except that which was scarcely perceptible at any one moment of its progress. “Things in possession,” he says, “have a very firm grip,” and I think the whole address is tinged with a sense of inertia, almost of weariness, even though it rises to moments of fine courage and the expression of an unshaken faith. Was this anything more than the brooding tone of a man who after all his experience was unquestionably a man of thought rather than a man of affairs?

The election of Cleveland to the presidency made it clear that Lowell was to bring to a close his diplomatic life in England, though some of his friends both there and in America clung to the illusion that the light way in which he wore the party dress might make it possible for a Democratic president to retain in office a man who had made himself so acceptable. Some even went so far as to see in such a policy the initiation of a new course in administration, by which ambassadors and ministers representing the United States should hold their appointments irrespective of change of party in administration, since the foreign policy of the government was practically continued on the same line, whichever party was in power. Shortly before the election Lowell wrote to Mr. Norton: “I follow your home politics with a certain personal interest. The latest news seems favorable to Blaine. I suppose in either event I am likely to be recalled, and I should not regret it but for two reasons,—certain friendships I have formed here, and the climate, which is more kindly to me than any I ever lived in. It is a singularly manly climate, full of composure and without womanish passion and extravagance.” After the election he wrote to the same friend: “As for myself, my successor was already named, and the place promised him in case of Blaine’s election. This I knew long ago, and I cannot quite make up my mind whether it is my weakness of good-nature and laizzez-faire that makes me willing to stay, or a persuasion of what is best for me. Everybody here is so continually lamenting my departure that I dare say my judgment isn’t worth much in the matter. My position is complicated in two ways,—the necessity of engaging a house, and now by Mabel’s intention of coming abroad for some time with her children. This would change the aspect of things entirely, for they are naturally the strongest magnets that draw me homewards. If she come, I may stay, whatever Cleveland thinks best.” To Mr. Field he wrote, 11 December, 1884: “We are well and waiting to hear our fate. I should be indifferent but for a few friendships here. All England is writing to express regret. But I am old enough to think that they will survive the loss of me.... Fanny is better than at any time since she left Spain, and quite willing to stay here now that the chances are against it. But she will not believe that anybody would recall me! She doesn’t know the depths of human depravity.”

So wonted had Lowell become to his English surroundings that some of his friends in England laid plans to keep him with them, and sounded him as to his willingness to be nominated for the professorship of English language and literature which had lately been established in Oxford. “Had he consented to stand,” says an editorial article in the London Times,[91] “not even a Board determined to sink Literature in Philology could have passed over his claims. But he declined for two reasons. There were claims of family over in Massachusetts; and, greatly as he loved the mental atmosphere of England, he thought it his duty not to accept a definitely English post. And the sense of duty is strong in that old Puritan stock from which he sprang.”

But there came an event which made all speculation regarding his plans vain and illusory. On

the 19th of February, 1885, Mrs. Lowell died after a short, sharp illness. The loss struck a chill in his heart which made him dumb for the most part, but he wrote to his friends, Mr. and Mrs. John W. Field, who had been sharers in his profound anxiety during those painful days in Madrid:—

To an old and attached friend of his wife he wrote: “You will have a sad pleasure in knowing that she suffered no pain. In her last consciousness when I asked her if she suffered, she shook her head. But I cannot write about these things coolly, and hate to put sentiment on paper where it lacks the witness of sincerity which the voice carries with it. And yet I am glad to write to you who knew how noble she was. You knew also her goodness and perfect faith, and are as sure as I am that she sees God.”

In fulfilling a wish of his wife, Lowell wrote to his old friend, Mrs. W. W. Story, 31 March: “I send you General Wallace’s book by to-day’s post. It was touchingly characteristic that I should find it on her writing-desk done up and addressed to you. She never forgot or neglected a duty. But, not knowing the requirements of the Post Office, she had closed it at both ends, and sealed it. So I was obliged, much to my regret, to have it done up in the right way. But I ordered her original address to be left inside that it might show she had not forgotten.

“I am on the whole glad to be rid of my official trammels and trappings. I do not know yet when my successor will arrive, but hardly look for him before July. I shall then go home, but whether to stay or not will be decided after I have looked about me there. If I decide to stay I shall certainly visit the Old World pretty regularly, and shall be sure to turn up in Rome.”

Lowell added one more to his public addresses before leaving England, that delivered on unveiling the bust of Coleridge, in Westminster Abbey, 7 May, 1885. It is a slight, graceful performance, but in it I think we may hear now and then that echo of his own thought about himself which we have more than once caught in his addresses, as when he says: “His critical sense rose like a forbidding apparition in the path of his poetic production;” and again: “We are here to-day not to consider what Coleridge owed to himself, to the family, or to the world, but what we owe to him. Let us at least not volunteer to draw his frailties from their dread abode. Our own are a far more profitable subject of contemplation. Let the man of imaginative temperament, who has never procrastinated, who has made all that was possible of his powers, cast the first stone.”

Early in June, 1885, Lowell left England, that held his wife’s grave, and returned lonely to his old home.

CHAPTER XVI

RETURN TO PRIVATE LIFE

1885-1888

Elmwood was let, and if it had been vacant Lowell could hardly have gone back there at once to live. There were too many ghosts in the house, he said. He made no attempt to take up again his college work, though he held his title of Smith Professor with emeritus added, and as his daughter had abandoned her plan of taking her children abroad, he made his home with her at Deerfoot Farm, Southborough, Massachusetts, about two hours by rail from Boston, in a pretty country where there was little intrusion of manufactures. He always had also a home in Boston at the house of his sister, Mrs. Putnam. He was at once besieged with invitations from many friends; as he wrote to Mr. Gilder: “I have been all these days in the condition of a bird of Paradise, unable to perch, no matter I might wish it, and perhaps embarrassed by the number of friendly roosts offered to my choice—yours not the least seductive among them.” He made up his mind to attend the Commencement at Harvard, though he dreaded both the heat and the emotion,—as he wrote: “O for a good freezing English July day!” He found himself deluged with letters—it was almost as bad as in London. Many he was unable to answer, many answered themselves after Napoleon’s easy-going philosophy, but with the return to private life and in the absence of any routine duties, Lowell took up again with a careless prodigality the occupation of letter-writing. He had left friends in England who had endeared themselves to him, and whose letters to him readily drew a response, and to his old friends he was always faithful, so that, taking Mr. Norton’s two volumes as a gauge, we find that he wrote twice as many friendly letters in the five years after his return to America as in the five years just preceding.

“I am already,” he writes to Mr. Norton, 22 July, 1885, “in love with Southborough, which is a charmingly unadulterated New England village, and with as lovely landscapes as I ever saw.... ’Tis an odd shift in the peep-hole of my panorama from London to this Chartreuse. For the present I like it and find it wholesome. I fancy myself happy sometimes—I am not sure—but then I never was for long;” and to Mrs. Clifford he wrote, 2 August: “I am planting my cabbages diligently and growing as much like them as I can. One must have confidants of one kind or another, and where one is cut off from women, one must follow Wordsworth’s advice and seek an intimacy with nature in whose impartial eyes cabbages are as interesting as—I was going to say strawberry-leaves, but remembered that you were an Englishwoman. I wasn’t going to say women, though logically I ought. Perhaps they are as safe. I am trying to make myself tolerable to five grandchildren, though I am not so sure that I have enough of the Grandfather in me to go round among so many.”

There is a playful allusion in this letter to a side of Lowell’s nature which is hinted at also in his choice of correspondents. He was peculiarly dependent upon the companionship of women, and he attracted to himself the wittiest and most responsive. For it was not so much the cushioned comfort that he looked for, as the cosiness of good fellowship and the intellectual equality which he sometimes found and always prized. He loved the generous natures with whom he had good converse, and his talk and letters went freely to these habitual dwellers in a world of honest sentiment. As in so many other cases, this side of Lowell’s life found its expression in poetry, and there is no exaggeration in the sonnet “Nightwatches,” written after the death of one who had stood to him in this free, intimate relation for many years.

In August he went to Washington to close his business with the State Department, and made with great pleasure the acquaintance of Mr. Bayard, then Secretary of State, and later like him to represent the country in London. He met President Cleveland also, and saw in him “a legitimate birth of Democracy and not a byblow like Butler and his kind.”

Lowell was solicited both by the editor of the Atlantic and other friends to take up again his contributions to literature, but he put them off. He had no inclination to write—he was glad of the solace of books and letters, but the spur to literary activity had been dulled. Yet he kept his Muse at least as a sort of friendly companion, as when on the seventy-fifth birthday of his neighbor and associate Dr. Asa Gray he wrote:—