James Russell Lowell and His Friends. Edward Everett Hale
spends three quarters of the time in endeavoring to row up that delectable writer.” To row up, in the slang of that time, meant to row an adversary up the Salt River. The phrase was Western. “Sometimes I think that silence is the best plan. So I hold my tongue till he brings up such a flimsy argument that I can stand it, or sit it, no longer. So out I burst, with greater fury for having been pent up so long, like a simmering volcano. However, both he and his wife try to make me as comfortable and as much at home as they can. … I think it was Herder who called Hoffman’s life a prolonged shriek of thirty volumes. Carlyle borrowed the idea, and calls Rousseau’s life a soliloquy of—so long. Now I should call Barzillai’s life one stretched syllogism. He is one of those men who walk through this world with a cursed ragged undersuit of natural capacity entirely concealed in a handsome borrowed surtout of other men’s ideas, buttoned up to the chin.”
This bitterness came in early in the exile. In after times Lowell could speak of Mr. Frost more fairly. In speaking at Concord, on the celebration of the 250th anniversary of the incorporation of the town, he said:—
“In rising to-day I could not help being reminded of one of my adventures with my excellent tutor when I was here in Concord. I was obliged to read with him ‘Locke on the Human Understanding.’ My tutor was a great admirer of Locke, and thought that he was the greatest Englishman that ever lived, and nothing pleased him more, consequently, than now and then to cross swords with Locke in argument. I was not slow, you may imagine, to encourage him in this laudable enterprise. Whenever a question arose between my tutor and Locke, I always took Locke’s side. I remember on one occasion, although I cannot now recall the exact passage in Locke—it was something about continuity of ideas—my excellent tutor told me that in that case Locke was quite mistaken in his views. My tutor said: ‘For instance, Locke says that the mind is never without an idea; now I am conscious frequently that my mind is without any idea at all.’ And I must confess that that anecdote came vividly to my mind when I got up on what Judge Hoar has justly characterized as the most important part of an orator’s person.”
Of Mrs. Frost, then a young mother with a baby two months old, he says: “Mrs. Frost is simply the best woman I ever set my eyes on. Always pleasant, always striving to make me happy and comfortable, and always with a sweet smile, a very sweet smile! She is a jewel! Then, too, I love her all the better for that she loves that husband of hers, and she does love him and cherish him. If she were not married and old enough to be my mother—no! my eldest sister—I’d marry her myself as a reward for so much virtue. That woman has really reconciled me to Concord. Nay! made me even almost like it, could such things be.”
By this time, the 15th of August, the poor boy, though robbed of his vacation, was coming round to see that there were few places in the world where one would more gladly spend the summer than the Concord of his time.
But we must not look in the boy’s letters for any full appreciation of Mr. Emerson. While he was at Concord Mr. Emerson delivered an address before the Cambridge divinity school which challenged the fury of conservative divines and was only shyly defended even by people who soon found out that Emerson is the prophet of our century. In one of Lowell’s letters of that summer written before that address was printed, and before Lowell had heard a word of it, he says: “I think of writing a snub for it, having it all cut and dried, and then inserting the necessary extracts.”
I need not say that this was mere banter. But it shows the mood of the day. Privately, and to this reader only, I will venture the statement that if the most orthodox preacher who reads the “Observer” should accidentally “convey” any passage from this forgotten address into next Sunday’s sermon in the First Church of Slabville, his hearers will be greatly obliged to him and will never dream that what he says is radical. For time advances in sermons, and has its revenges.
Lowell speaks of Mr. Emerson as very kind to him. He describes a visit to him in which Lowell seems to have introduced some fellow-students. These were among the earliest of that endless train of bores who in forty years never irritated our Plato. But, alas! Lowell’s letter preserves no drop of the honey which fell from Plato’s lips. It is only a most amusing burlesque of the homage rendered by the four or five visitors. I may say in passing that the characteristics of the five men could hardly have been seized upon more vividly after they had lived forty years than they appear in the hundred words then written by this bright boy.
In the address at Concord, delivered forty-seven years afterward, he said:—
“I am not an adopted son of Concord. I cannot call myself that. But I can say, perhaps, that under the old fashion which still existed when I was young, I was ‘bound out’ to Concord for a period of time; and I must say that she treated me very kindly. … I then for the first time made the acquaintance of Mr. Emerson; and I still recall, with a kind of pathos, as Dante did that of his old teacher, Brunetto Latini, ‘La cara e buona imagine paterna,’ ‘The dear and good paternal image,’ which he showed me here; and I can also finish the quotation and say, ‘And shows me how man makes himself eternal.’ I remember he was so kind to me—I, rather a flighty and exceedingly youthful boy—as to take me with him on some of his walks, particularly a walk to the cliffs, which I shall never forget. And perhaps this feeling of gratitude which I have to Concord gives me some sort of claim to appear here to-day.”
Under Barzillai’s tuition he settled down to his college work. He had the class poem to write. As he was not to be permitted to deliver it, it may be imagined that he did not write it with much enthusiasm. He put it off, and he put it off. That was the way, it must be confessed, he sometimes met such exigencies afterward.
July 8 he wrote: “Nor have I said anything about the poem. I have not written a line since my ostracism, and, in fact, doubt very much whether I can write even the half of one.” It had been proposed that it should be read by some one else on Class Day; but to this Lowell objected, and the faculty of the college objected also. On the 23d he writes: “As for the poem, you will see the whole of it when it is printed, as it will be as soon as Scates gets back to superintend it. Do you know, I am more than half a mind to dedicate it to Bowen.” Then on the 15th of August: “I have such a headache that I will not write any more to-night, though after I go to bed I am in hopes to finish my poem. Thinking does not interfere so much with a headache as writing.” Then, on the next line: “August 18. The ‘poem’ is in the hands of the printer. I received a proof-sheet to-day from the ‘Harvardiana’ press, containing the first eight pages.” But in the same letter afterwards: “How under the sun, or, more appropriately, perhaps, the moon, which is, or appears to be, the muse of so many of the tuneful, I shall finish the poem I don’t know. Stearns came up here last Saturday, a week ago to-day, and stirred me up about the printing of it, whereupon I began Sunday to finish it in earnest, and straightway scratched off about two hundred and fifty lines. But now I have come to a dead stand and am as badly off as ever, without so much hope. ‘Nothing so difficult, etc., etc., except the end,’ you know. And here I am, as it were, at the tail end of nothing, and not a pillow of consolation whereon to lay the aching head of despair.”
LOWELL’S POEM TO HIS COLLEGE CLASS
transcription
These words are perhaps a fair enough description of the poem. It has in it a good deal of very crude satire, particularly a bitter invective against abolitionists who talked and did nothing. But the ode of the Cherokee warrior, bewailing the savage transfer of his nation which had been consummated under Andrew Jackson’s rule, seems to be worth preserving. At the time, be it remembered, the poem was most cordially received by the Lilliput circle of Boston and Cambridge:—
“Oh abolitionists, both men and maids,
Who leave your desks, your parlors, and your trades,
To wander restless through the land and shout—
But few of you could tell us what about!
Can ye not hear where on the Southern breeze
Swells the last wailing of the Cherokees?
Hark! the sad Indian sighs a last adieu
To