Horace Elisha Scudder

“ The shock of this rupture left not a shade of reproach for the girl in Lowell’s mind, but it broke up the fountains of the deep in his own life. He was scarcely more than a boy in years, but he had in temperament and capacity for emotion a far greater maturity. He could write of himself a few years later: “Brought up in a very reserved and conventional family, I cannot in society appear what I really am. I go out sometimes with my heart so full of yearning toward my fellows that the indifferent look with which even entire strangers pass me brings tears to my eyes.” ”

“ Lowell herself plainly had but a humble conceit of her poetic gift, and it does not appear that poetry was an abundant resource with her. But art there is of no mean order in this little book. It is a delicate instrument on which she plays; there are not many stops, but there is a vibrant tone which thrills the ear. Tenderness indeed is the prevailing note, but in one poem, “Africa,” there is a massiveness of structure, and a sonorous dignity of measure which appeal powerfully to the imagination. ”

“ It is easy to believe that Lowell, coming away from the printing-office, where he had learned that the printers needed at once more copy, paused near the willows, and in the warm, hazy November afternoon let his mind drift idly over the scene and blend with it reflections on his own life. The poet, by virtue of his gift, is always young, and yet when young is the most retrospective of men. ”

“ Their vitality is the vitality not of one or another blood or tongue, but of human nature; their truth is not topical and transitory, but of universal acceptation; and thus all great authors seem the coevals not only of each other, but of whoever reads them, growing wiser with him as he grows wise, and unlocking to him one secret after another as his own life and experience give him the key, but on no other condition.”
Now Lowell’s own interest in literature had been direct. It would be idle to say that literature was interesting or valuable to him only so far as it was a criticism of life. ”

“ I look upon death so constantly and surely as but a continuation of life (after the glad removal or subsidence of the plethora of flesh which now chokes half the spirit out of us) that I shall be quite willing to send before us such an ambassador as our little angel would be if he goes sooner than we do. At all events, nothing can ever take away from me the joy I have already had in it.” The haunting fear which every young father has at such a time, and which Lowell intimates in these lines, was not made real at once, but the child lived with them only a brief fourteen months. ”

“ We have never got over a certain shamefacedness at the disrespectability of our position. We feel as if when we espoused Liberty we had contracted a mésalliance. The criticism of the traveller who looks at us from a monarchical point of view exasperates us. Instead of minding our own business we have been pitifully anxious as to what would be thought of us in Europe. We have had Europe in our minds fifty times, where we have had God and conscience once. Our literature has endeavored to convince Europeans that we are as like them as circumstances would admit. ”

“ The connection with the Standard had not altered Lowell’s position in politics. It found him independent, and left him so. He was no less a reformer at the end than he was at the beginning, but he was confirmed in his belief that the world must be healed by degrees; and as he was a disbeliever in the short cut to emancipation by way of disunion, so he was at once a firm believer in radical reform, but skeptical of ultimate success through the rooting out of individual evils. He found himself among people who were sure of their panaceas. ”

“ Briggs that the verses did not take, and he grew petulant over the stupidity of the public. Lowell’s own ardor cooled. The style of composition was indeed to real writing what the pun is to real wit. In the heat of firing off these fire-crackers, ever so much execution seems to be done, but the laugh that follows is not repeated, and the cleverness and point seem dulled when the bristling jests crowd each other, giving no relief to each. ”

“ For it is the glory of nature that in her least part she gives us all, and in that simple love-token of hers we may behold the type of all her sublime mysteries; as in the least fragment of the true artist we discern the working of the same forces which culminate gloriously in a Hamlet or a Faust. We would no longer see the spirit of our people held up as a mirror to the Old World ”

“ Without saying a word to any one, I shall quietly proceed to Dane Law College to recitation. Now shall I be happy again as far as that is concerned. Nature will smile for me yet again. I shall hear the merry tinkle of the brook and think not of the tinkle of dollars and cents. Upon the ocean I may look, nor dream of the rates of freight. Let us rejoice, George, in the days of our youth. We shall find it very different when we come to support ourselves. ”

“ Leaving the sin of it to God, I believed and still believe that slavery is the Achilles heel of our polity: that it is a temporary and false supremacy of the white races, sure to destroy that supremacy at last, because an enslaved people always prove themselves of more enduring fibre than their enslavers, as not suffering from the social vices sure to be engendered by oppression in the governing class. Against these and many other things I thought all honest men should protest. ”

“ Hughes, in the letter already quoted, I conceived my parson-editor with his pedantry and verbosity, his amiable vanity and superiority to the verses he was editing, as a fitting artistic background and foil. It gave me the chance, too, of glancing obliquely at many things which were beyond the horizon of my other characters. I was told afterwards that my Parson Wilbur was only Jedediah Cleishbotham over again, and I dare say it may be so; but I drew him from the life as well as I could, and for the authentic reasons I have mentioned. ”

“ I insist only that in our college courses this should be a separate study, and that, good as it is in itself, it should, in the scheme of general instruction, be restrained to its own function as the guide to something better, and that something better is Literature. The blossoms of language have certainly as much value as its roots, for if the roots secrete food and thereby transmit life to the plant, yet the joyous consummation of that life is in the blossoms, which alone bear the seeds that distribute and renew it in other growths. ”

“ When will men learn that the only true conservatism lies in growth and progress, that whatever has ceased growing has begun to die? It is not the conservative, but the retarding element which resides in the pocket. It is droll to witness the fate of this conservatism when the ship of any state goes to pieces. It lashes itself firmly to the ponderous anchor it has provided for such an emergency, cuts all loose, and—goes to the bottom. There are a great many things to be done in this country, but the first is the abolition of slavery. ”

“ The Broadway Chronicle chronicles the thoughts and feelings of Broadway, not those of the New England people whom you seem willing to receive somewhat from. Should not a title have truth for its first recommendation? Do you write from the meridian of Broadway? I think you write from a sturdy New England heart, that has a good strong well-spring of old Puritan blood beating therein, with all its hatred to forms and cant, to fashion and show. If ‘Pistol speaks naught but truth,’ should his name be a lie? Pistol’s is not; it expresses the man truly. ”

“ In this fuller series of letters which is largely contained in Mr. Norton’s two volumes, Lowell is the frank, unformed boy, giving vent to nonsense, a lad’s hasty impulse, and the foolery which goes on in the name of sentiment. The equality of age created a different relation between them from that which Lowell bore to Shackford, and the familiarity of their intercourse called out all manner of intellectual pranks and youthful persiflage. ”

“ While philosophers are wrangling, and politicians playing at snapdragon with the destinies of millions, the poet, in the silent deeps of his soul, listens to those mysterious pulses which, from one central heart, send life and beauty through the finest veins of the universe, and utters truths to be sneered at, perchance, by contemporaries, but which become religion to posterity.... ”

“ The pressure upon Lowell, which his college work and his editorship brought, did, during these four years, stop, somewhat, his spontaneity. He wrote but few poems, and his letters show the effort he needed to make to force some gayety. “I am that man among mortals,” he wrote to Miss Norton, “whose friends must forgive him the most treasons against friendship,—silence, staying away, dulness when he writes or comes—and I know not what else,—yet I do believe that my heart holds fire as long as another, and that I neither grow cool nor forget sooner than most. ”

“ Doubtless, there are no nations on the earth so wicked as those which profess Christianity; and the blame may be laid in great measure at the door of the church, which has always sought temporal power, and has chosen rather to lean upon the arm of flesh than upon that of God. The church has corrupted Christianity. She has decked her person and embroidered her garments with the spoils of pagan altars, and has built her temples of blocks which paganism has squared ready to her hand. ”

“ To one walking in the pure light of upper day, the sound of their service seems dim and far off, and, if he catches a word here and there, it is an obsolete language which does not appeal to the present heart and soul, but only to a vague reverence for what is ancient, a mysterious awe for what is past.”
The winter had been passed in this experimental fashion, Mrs. Lowell translating poems from the German by her husband’s side, as he wrote now verse, now prose, intent on the questions of the day, yet never really giving himself out except now and then in some spontaneous bit of poetry. ”

“ There is no such help to a fuller mastery of our vernacular. It compels us to such a choosing and testing, to so nice a discrimination of sound, propriety, position, and shade of meaning, that we now first learn the secret of the words we have been using or misusing all our lives, and are gradually made aware that to set forth even the plainest matter as it should be set forth is not only a very difficult thing, calling for thought and practice, but an affair of conscience as well. Translating teaches us as nothing else can, not only that there is a best way, but that it is the only way. ”