Lowell

“ When one considers the eagerness with which Lowell vented himself in the months of his close connection with the Anti-Slavery Standard, one is not surprised that in a book which is at once a defence of criticism and a swift survey of the whole field of American letters as it lay under the eye of this knight-errant of freedom and truth, Lowell should have displayed, with little reserve, the frankness and impetuosity of his nature. It is only after a closer inspection that one discovers also how sound and how generous is his judgment. ”

“ I believe neither in heroes nor in saints; but I believe in great and good men, for I have known them, and among such men Lowell was of the richest nature I have known. His nature was not always serene or pellucid; it was sometimes roiled by the currents that counter and cross in all of us; but it was without the least alloy of insincerity, and it was never darkened by the shadow of a selfish fear. His genius was an instrument that responded in affluent harmony to the power that made him a humorist and that made him a poet, and appointed him rarely to be quite either alone. ”

“ There is a freshness about Lowell’s Poems which bewitches our fancy. They display a genius that has startled us. They breathe a healthy, honest, good old Saxon spirit, that opens our heart to them as by a sign of brotherhood. We feel that he is kin of our kin and blood of our blood, and we take his book to our bosom without suffering it to plead the exquisite petition which he has put into its mouth, for “charity in Christ’s dear name.” Lowell is a man after our own heart. ”

“ Nature, who appealed so strongly to his heart, had made him a poet, and she took her own way of teaching him the mysteries of his art.
Lowell enjoyed his singularly fortunate and happy boyhood as only one gifted with a poetic mind could. To him New England village life revealed a charm that enabled him in after-days to paint a picture of it as lovingly faithful as one of Shakespeare's scenes. In his charming reminiscence, Cambridge Thirty Years Ago, he has preserved one of the dearest memories of his boyhood. ”

“ One evening as they sat in the dim parlor Lowell reached out a muscular arm and flung the shutters of one window back on their rusted hinges. Mira started from her chair with a cry, dropping the field flowers he had brought her from her lap. Lowell caught her hand and drew her to the window. A broad band of moonlight fell upon her; the heavy scent of the sweet clover hung on the scarcely stirred air. It was just such an evening twenty years ago——
Suddenly the man's eyes wandered from her face to the gown she wore. ”

“ Of all men I have ever known, Dr. Lowell is one of the brightest exemplars of the character and teachings of the Master; for all denominations respect him, and confide in him. For more than forty years I have known him; and, in all the relations of a good pastor to his people, I have never known a better. I have met him in the sick chamber, with the dying, and in the house of prayer. In the character of a teacher, and a leader of the people heavenward, no one among us has been more valued. ”

“ As a comparative stranger might draw from Lowell one of his most delightful letters, if some question he sent him happened to catch him at a favorable moment, when he needed only an occasion for the letter that was on tap, so these students, one or more, offered an easy audience, and Lowell, rarely out of the mood for talk, would spin his gossamer or weave his strong fabric for them as well as for any one else, without paying very close heed to them personally. ”

“ It was so unusual for Lowell to dramatize, even in poetry, that this assumption has a singular interest, and, barring the element of Southern birth, is a close copy of Lowell’s mind at this time. Every man of thought has his dream of action, and we can read in this speech how Lowell would have translated his ideals of truth, freedom, and justice into executive acts, could he, who had watched the conflict closely, have had the chance that poets picture of being king for a day. ”

“ Lowell was, to his vivid African imagination, the ideal man made in the image of God, calm in judgment, free from all superstitions and prejudices, a citizen of the world of human thought, a prince of that vast ethical aristocracy of the free thinkers of all ages who knew no racial or conventional barriers between man and man. ”

“ As we have had frequent occasion to note, Lowell all his life was subject to fluctuation of moods. The most comprehensive cause was no doubt in the very constitution of his temperament, and as he was overclouded at times, so for him the sun when it shone was more brilliant than to many. But one asks most anxiously, are such moods superficial or do they trench upon the very citadel of being, sapping and mining the walls, so that if entrance is made, the very heart stops beating. In all the shifting of Lowell’s mind there were great fundamental beliefs from which he would not be separated. ”

“ As he had listened to Lowell’s impassioned appeals for human brotherhood, his scathing ridicule of pride and prejudice, and the poetic beauty of the language in which he proclaimed his own emancipation from all the laws of caste, the fiery eloquence with which he trampled upon all the barriers man had erected against his fellow man, his soul was thrilled into ecstasy with the conviction that this scholar and scientific thinker, at least, was a free man. ”

“ 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. ”

“ I have been reading some of Lowell’s new poems in which he shows unexpected advance on himself, but perhaps most in technical skill and courage. It is in talent rather than in poetic tone, and rather expresses his wish, his ambition, than the uncontrollable interior impulse which is the authentic mark of a new poem, and which is unanalyzable, and makes the merit of an ode of Collins or Gray or Wordsworth or Herbert or Byron, and which is felt in the pervading tone rather than in brilliant parts or lines ”

“ Lowell, I wish to say to you that you have taught me the greatest faith of life, faith in my fellow man without which there can be no faith in God. What I have suffered as a man as I have come in contact with the brutality with which my race is almost universally treated, God only can ever know.
“The culture I have received has simply multiplied a thousandfold my capacity to suffer. But for the inspiration of your manhood I would have ended my life in the river. ”

“ Lowell was in thought or word or deed; and very refreshing it is, like a cool breath of pure air in the artificial heat and closeness of a crowded room, to consider such a character in these days of blatant, forth-putting mediocrity. When to seem is at a premium, and to be at a discount, it is invigorating to turn to a life which owed nothing to adventitious or meritricious aid; a life which not only was fine, but escaped the soiling consequent upon too much mental fingering by the world at large. ”

“ In his half-homeless condition, Lowell looked with eagerness to his summers in England. There he had in its leisurely form the social life which had come to be a real solace to him, and there too he found the world arranged for the ease and comfort of a solitary. He sailed for England this year on the 21st of April, and found himself shortly in his familiar lodgings in London. He liked the sense of world activity which he felt in the heart of that great city. “Nothing can be more bewildering,” he wrote to his daughter, “than the sudden change in my habits and surroundings. ”

“ Lowell, with its steeple-crowned factories, resembles a Spanish town with its convents; but with this difference, that in Lowell, you meet no rags nor Madonnas, and that the nuns of Lowell, instead of working sacred hearts, spin and weave cotton. Lowell is not amusing, but it is neat, decent, peaceable, and sage. Will it always be so? Will it be so long? It would be rash to affirm it; hitherto the life of manufacturing operatives has proved little favorable to the preservation of severe morals. So it has been in France, as well as in England; in Germany and Switzerland, as well as in France. ”

“ I could never recognize any other sort of superiority; but that I am proud to recognize; and I had before Lowell some such feeling as an obscure subaltern might have before his general. He was by nature a bit of a disciplinarian, and the effect was from him as well as in me; I dare say he let me feel whatever difference there was as helplessly as I felt it. At the first encounter with people he always was apt to have a certain frosty shyness, a smiling cold, as from the long, high-sunned winters of his Puritan race ”

“ Lowell was one of the two extreme types of American whom Victorian England chose to like and admire. One, of the Mark Twain and Joaquin Miller sort, was free and easy, smacking of the wild West, completely in contrast with the English gentleman; the other, in the persons of men like Lowell and Charles Eliot Norton, was the nearest American approach to cultivated John Bull. In diplomatic circles Lowell’s tact always mollified his firmness, even leading to criticism from some of his countrymen because he never defied nor blustered. ”

“ Thus far Lowell had looked out on life pretty steadily from the sheltered privacy of a happy home, and he was not immediately to change his surroundings; but a certain induration was now to be effected which can scarcely be said to have arrested his spontaneity, but may fairly be looked upon as leading him to regard himself more as others regarded him, as no longer “a boy of twelve behind a bearded vizor,” but as grown up and become a man of the world. ”

“ We tender to him, though we have never met in the flesh, our good right hand, joining his herewith in cordial fellowship, the hearts of both being in our eyes the while:—we tender him our hand—he far away in his student’s room at Boston and we here in old Philadelphia—and we tell sneering worldlings and critics who are born only to be damned, that, for one so young, Lowell has written grandly; that he is full, even to overflowing, of purity, enthusiasm, imagination, and love for all God’s creatures ”

“ In the midst of our conversation young Lowell came bounding up the stairs and into the room where I sate with the Shaker company, and his handsome, fresh, and animated countenance, beaming with life and cordiality, shone like a May sun in upon that pale, although kind assembly. He and Maria were just arrived, and we had a cordial meeting in the midst of the Shaker sisters, who smiled gently and watched us, not without sympathy. They now invited us all to come and take supper with them, but the Lowells were going to the Lebanon Wells, because Maria required rest. ”

“ Charles Lowell was the seventh in descent from Percival Lowell, or Lowle, as the name sometimes was written, a well-to-do merchant of Bristol, who, with children and grandchildren, a goodly company, came from England in 1639, and settled in Newbury, Mass. [1] Charles Lowell’s father, the Hon. John Lowell, had led a distinguished career as a lawyer and publicist; and as a member of the corporation of Harvard College, and of learned societies having their headquarters in Boston, had been a conspicuous figure in the community. ”

“ Will rise in majesty to meet thine own;”
Lowell has a passion, if we may use the word, for images of quiet beauty. He seems to worship nature; he is evidently a dreamer. We venture to predict that he has spent many a day loitering through the summer woods, or lingering by the side of some silvery stream. He is a close observer—as what genius is not? ”

“ Lowell’s father, mother, and sister Rebecca went to Europe early in the summer of 1837. They were gone three years, and during that time the young collegian found in his brother Charles his nearest friend and adviser; his house indeed was the student’s home when he was not in college, and his wife was the best of sisters to him. Mrs. Anna Cabot Lowell was herself a woman of fine culture and of unwonted intellectual power. At a later period than this she opened a school for girls, which is looked upon by many now in mature life with warm gratitude. ”

“ In what light should we stand before the world, after winning the great verdict in the Alabama case:—as a community of sharp traders, condoning a great national wrong for a petty sum of money?—or as a people striving chiefly for the maintenance of the true principles of national honor and international comity? Mr. Lowell, perhaps more than any one in America, was the man who, by training, by culture, by scholarship, by attainments in the world of letters, by unsullied character, was fitted to present to the English people an embodiment of Americanism, in its best expression. ”

“ But after all allowance has been made, it is clear that in a community which was eagerly expecting great things in literature, Lowell, though he had published little and much of that anonymously, was already one of the candidates for fame. He himself did not need this incentive. He had the consciousness of power and that audience of one which stimulated him to the exercise of his power. ”