LITERARY FRIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCES--Studies of Lowell

by William Dean Howells

STUDIES OF LOWELL

I have already spoken of my earliest meetings with Lowell at Cambridgewhen I came to New England on a literary pilgrimage from the West in1860. I saw him more and more after I went to live in Cambridge in 1866;and I now wish to record what I knew of him during the years that passedbetween this date and that of his death. If the portrait I shall try topaint does not seem a faithful likeness to others who knew him, I shallonly claim that so he looked to me, at this moment and at that. If I donot keep myself quite out of the picture, what painter ever did?

I. 

It was in the summer of 1865 that I came home from my consular post atVenice; and two weeks after I landed in Boston, I went out to see Lowellat Elmwood, and give him an inkstand that I had brought him from Italy. The bronze lobster whose back opened and disclosed an inkpot and asand-box was quite ugly; but I thought it beautiful then, and if Lowellthought otherwise he never did anything to let me know it. He put thething in the middle of his writing-table (he nearly always wrote on apasteboard pad resting upon his knees), and there it remained as long asI knew the place--a matter of twenty-five years; but in all that time Isuppose the inkpot continued as dry as the sand-box. 

My visit was in the heat of August, which is as fervid in Cambridge as itcan well be anywhere, and I still have a sense of his study windowslifted to the summer night, and the crickets and grasshoppers crying inat them from the lawns and the gardens outside. Other people went awayfrom Cambridge in the summer to the sea and to the mountains, but Lowellalways stayed at Elmwood, in an impassioned love for his home and for histown. I must have found him there in the afternoon, and he must havemade me sup with him (dinner was at two o'clock) and then go with him fora long night of talk in his study. He liked to have some one help himidle the time away, and keep him as long as possible from his work; andno doubt I was impersonally serving his turn in this way, aside from anypleasure he might have had in my company as some one he had always beenkind to, and as a fresh arrival from the Italy dear to us both. 

He lighted his pipe, and from the depths of his easychair, invited my shyyouth to all the ease it was capable of in his presence. It was notmuch; I loved him, and he gave me reason to think that he was fond of me, but in Lowell I was always conscious of an older and closer and strictercivilization than my own, an unbroken tradition, a more authoritativestatus. His democracy was more of the head and mine more of the heart, and his denied the equality which mine affirmed. But his nature was sonoble and his reason so tolerant that whenever in our long acquaintance Ifound it well to come to open rebellion, as I more than once did, headmitted my right of insurrection, and never resented the outbreak. Idisliked to differ with him, and perhaps he subtly felt this so much thathe would not dislike me for doing it. He even suffered being taxed withinconsistency, and where he saw that he had not been quite just, he wouldtake punishment for his error, with a contrition that was sometimeshumorous and always touching. 

Just then it was the dark hour before the dawn with Italy, and he wasinterested but not much encouraged by what I could tell him of thefeeling in Venice against the Austrians. He seemed to reserve a likescepticism concerning the fine things I was hoping for the Italians inliterature, and he confessed an interest in the facts treated which inthe retrospect, I am aware, was more tolerant than participant of myenthusiasm. That was always Lowell's attitude towards the opinions ofpeople he liked, when he could not go their lengths with them, andnothing was more characteristic of his affectionate nature and his justintelligence. He was a man of the most strenuous convictions, but heloved many sorts of people whose convictions he disagreed with, and hesuffered even prejudices counter to his own if they were not ignoble. Inthe whimsicalities of others he delighted as much as in his own. 

II. 

Our associations with Italy held over until the next day, when afterbreakfast he went with me towards Boston as far as "the village": for sohe liked to speak of Cambridge in the custom of his younger days whenwide tracts of meadow separated Harvard Square from his life-long home atElmwood. We stood on the platform of the horsecar together, and when Iobjected to his paying my fare in the American fashion, he allowed thatthe Italian usage of each paying for himself was the politer way. Hewould not commit himself about my returning to Venice (for I had notgiven up my place, yet, and was away on leave), but he intimated hisdistrust of the flattering conditions of life abroad. He said it wascharming to be treated 'da signore', but he seemed to doubt whether itwas well; and in this as in all other things he showed his final fealtyto the American ideal. 

It was that serious and great moment after the successful close of thecivil war when the republican consciousness was more robust in us thanever before or since; but I cannot recall any reference to the historicalinterest of the time in Lowell's talk. It had been all about literatureand about travel; and now with the suggestion of the word village itbegan to be a little about his youth. I have said before how reluctanthe was to let his youth go from him; and perhaps the touch with myjuniority had made him realize how near he was to fifty, and set himthinking of the past which had sorrows in it to age him beyond his years. He would never speak of these, though he often spoke of the past. Hetold once of having been on a brief journey when he was six years old, with his father, and of driving up to the gate of Elmwood in the evening, and his father saying, "Ah, this is a pleasant place! I wonder who liveshere--what little boy?" At another time he pointed out a certain windowin his study, and said he could see himself standing by it when he couldonly get his chin on the window-sill. His memories of the house, and ofeverything belonging to it, were very tender; but he could laugh over anescapade of his youth when he helped his fellow-students pull down hisfather's fences, in the pure zeal of good-comradeship. 

III. 

My fortunes took me to New York, and I spent most of the winter of 1865-6writing in the office of 'The Nation'. I contributed several sketches ofItalian travel to that paper; and one of these brought me a preciousletter from Lowell. He praised my sketch, which he said he had readwithout the least notion who had written it, and he wanted me to feel thefull value of such an impersonal pleasure in it. At the same time he didnot fail to tell me that he disliked some pseudo-cynical verses of minewhich he had read in another place; and I believe it was then that hebade me "sweat the Heine out of" me, "as men sweat the mercury out oftheir bones. "

When I was asked to be assistant editor of the Atlantic Monthly, and cameon to Boston to talk the matter over with the publishers, I went out toCambridge and consulted Lowell. He strongly urged me to take theposition (I thought myself hopefully placed in New York on The Nation);and at the same time he seemed to have it on his heart to say that he hadrecommended some one else for it, never, he owned, having thought of me. 

He was most cordial, but after I came to live in Cambridge (where themagazine was printed, and I could more conveniently look over theproofs), he did not call on me for more than a month, and seemed quite tohave forgotten me. We met one night at Mr. Norton's, for one of theDante readings, and he took no special notice of me till I happened tosay something that offered him a chance to give me a little humoroussnub. I was speaking of a paper in the Magazine on the "ClaudianEmissary, " and I demanded (no doubt a little too airily) something like"Who in the world ever heard of the Claudian Emissary?" "You are inCambridge, Mr. Howells, " Lowell answered, and laughed at my confusion. Having put me down, he seemed to soften towards me, and at parting hesaid, with a light of half-mocking tenderness in his beautiful eyes, "Goodnight, fellow-townsman. " "I hardly knew we were fellow-townsmen, " Ireturned. He liked that, apparently, and said he had been meaning tocall upon me; and that he was coming very soon. 

He was as good as his word, and after that hardly a week of any kind ofweather passed but he mounted the steps to the door of the ugly littlehouse in which I lived, two miles away from him, and asked me to walk. These walks continued, I suppose, until Lowell went abroad for a winterin the early seventies. They took us all over Cambridge, which he knewand loved every inch of, and led us afield through the straggling, unhandsome outskirts, bedrabbled with squalid Irish neighborhoods, andfraying off into marshes and salt meadows. He liked to indulge an excessof admiration for the local landscape, and though I never heard himprofess a preference for the Charles River flats to the finest Alpinescenery, I could well believe he would do so under provocation of a fitlistener's surprise. He had always so much of the boy in him that heliked to tease the over-serious or over-sincere. He liked to tease andhe liked to mock, especially his juniors, if any touch of affectation, orany little exuberance of manner gave him the chance; when he once came tofetch me, and the young mistress of the house entered with a certainexcessive elasticity, he sprang from his seat, and minced towards her, with a burlesque of her buoyant carriage which made her laugh. When hehad given us his heart in trust of ours, he used us like a youngerbrother and sister; or like his own children. He included our childrenin his affection, and he enjoyed our fondness for them as if it weresomething that had come back to him from his own youth. I think he hadalso a sort of artistic, a sort of ethical pleasure in it, as being ofthe good tradition, of the old honest, simple material, from whichpleasing effects in literature and civilization were wrought. He likedgiving the children books, and writing tricksy fancies in these, where hemasked as a fairy prince; and as long as he lived he remembered his earlykindness for them. 

IV. 

In those walks of ours I believe he did most of the talking, and from histalk then and at other times there remains to me an impression of hisgrowing conservatism. I had in fact come into his life when it had spentits impulse towards positive reform, and I was to be witness of itsincreasing tendency towards the negative sort. He was quite past thestorm and stress of his anti-slavery age; with the close of the war whichhad broken for him all his ideals of inviolable peace, he had reached theage of misgiving. I do not mean that I ever heard him express doubt ofwhat he had helped to do, or regret for what he had done; but I know thathe viewed with critical anxiety what other men were doing with theaccomplished facts. His anxiety gave a cast of what one may callreluctance from the political situation, and turned him back towardsthose civic and social defences which he had once seemed willing toabandon. I do not mean that he lost faith in democracy; this faith heconstantly then and signally afterwards affirmed; but he certainly had nolonger any faith in insubordination as a means of grace. He preached aquite Socratic reverence for law, as law, and I remember that once when Ihad got back from Canada in the usual disgust for the Americancustom-house, and spoke lightly of smuggling as not an evil in itself, and perhaps even a right under our vexatious tariff, he would not haveit, but held that the illegality of the act made it a moral of fence. This was not the logic that would have justified the attitude of theanti-slavery men towards the fugitive slave act; but it was in accordwith Lowell's feeling about John Brown, whom he honored while alwayscondemning his violation of law; and it was in the line of all his laterthinking. In this, he wished you to agree with him, or at least hewished to make you; but he did not wish you to be more of his mind thanhe was himself. In one of those squalid Irish neighborhoods I confesseda grudge (a mean and cruel grudge, I now think it) for the increasingpresence of that race among us, but this did not please him; and I amsure that whatever misgiving he had as to the future of America, he wouldnot have had it less than it had been the refuge and opportunity of thepoor of any race or color. Yet he would not have had it this alone. There was a line in his poem on Agassiz which he left out of the printedversion, at the fervent entreaty of his friends, as saying too bitterlyhis disappointment with his country. Writing at the distance of Europe, and with America in the perspective which the alien environment clouded, he spoke of her as "The Land of Broken Promise. " It was a splendidreproach, but perhaps too dramatic to bear the full test of analysis, andyet it had the truth in it, and might, I think, have usefully stood, tothe end of making people think. Undoubtedly it expressed his sense ofthe case, and in the same measure it would now express that of many wholove their country most among us. It is well to hold one's country toher promises, and if there are any who think she is forgetting them it istheir duty to say so, even to the point of bitter accusation. I do notsuppose it was the "common man" of Lincoln's dream that Lowell thoughtAmerica was unfaithful to, though as I have suggested he could be tenderof the common man's hopes in her; but he was impeaching in that blottedline her sincerity with the uncommon man: the man who had expected of hera constancy to the ideals of her youth end to the high martyr-moods ofthe war which had given an unguarded and bewildering freedom to a race ofslaves. He was thinking of the shame of our municipal corruptions, thedebased quality of our national statesmanship, the decadence of our wholecivic tone, rather than of the increasing disabilities of thehard-working poor, though his heart when he thought of them was withthem, too, as it was in "the time when the slave would not let himsleep. "

He spoke very rarely of those times, perhaps because their political andsocial associations were so knit up with the saddest and tenderestpersonal memories, which it was still anguish to touch. Not only was he

 "--not of the race That hawk, their sorrows in the market place, "

but so far as my witness went he shrank from mention of them. I do notremember hearing him speak of the young wife who influenced him sopotently at the most vital moment, and turned him from his wholescholarly and aristocratic tradition to an impassioned championship ofthe oppressed; and he never spoke of the children he had lost. I recallbut one allusion to the days when he was fighting the anti-slavery battlealong the whole line, and this was with a humorous relish of his Irishservant's disgust in having to wait upon a negro whom he had asked to histable. 

He was rather severe in his notions of the subordination his domesticsowed him. They were "to do as they were bid, " and yet he had atenderness for such as had been any time with him, which was wounded whenonce a hired man long in his employ greedily overreached him in a certaintransaction. He complained of that with a simple grief for the man'sindelicacy after so many favors from him, rather than with anyresentment. His hauteur towards his dependents was theoretic; his actualbehavior was of the gentle consideration common among Americans of goodbreeding, and that recreant hired man had no doubt never been suffered toexceed him in shows of mutual politeness. Often when the maid was aboutweightier matters, he came and opened his door to me himself, welcomingme with the smile that was like no other. Sometimes he said, "Siete ilbenvenuto, " or used some other Italian phrase, which put me at ease withhim in the region where we were most at home together. 

Looking back I must confess that I do not see what it was he found tomake him wish for my company, which he presently insisted upon havingonce a week at dinner. After the meal we turned into his study where wesat before a wood fire in winter, and he smoked and talked. He smoked apipe which was always needing tobacco, or going out, so that I have thefigure of him before my eyes constantly getting out of his deep chair torekindle it from the fire with a paper lighter. He was often out of hischair to get a book from the shelves that lined the walls, either for apassage which he wished to read, or for some disputed point which hewished to settle. If I had caused the dispute, he enjoyed putting me inthe wrong; if he could not, he sometimes whimsically persisted in hiserror, in defiance of all authority; but mostly he had such reverence forthe truth that he would not question it even in jest. 

If I dropped in upon him in the afternoon I was apt to find him readingthe old French poets, or the plays of Calderon, or the 'Divina Commedia', which he magnanimously supposed me much better acquainted with than I wasbecause I knew some passages of it by heart. One day I came in quoting

 "Io son, cantava, io son dolce Sirena, Che i marinai in mezzo al mar dismago. "

He stared at me in a rapture with the matchless music, and then utteredall his adoration and despair in one word. "Damn!" he said, and no more. I believe he instantly proposed a walk that day, as if his study wallswith all their vistas into the great literatures cramped his soulliberated to a sense of ineffable beauty of the verse of the 'sommapoeta'. But commonly be preferred to have me sit down with him thereamong the mute witnesses of the larger part of his life. As I havesuggested in my own case, it did not matter much whether you broughtanything to the feast or not. If he liked you he liked being with you, not for what he got, but for what he gave. He was fond of one man whom Irecall as the most silent man I ever met. I never heard him sayanything, not even a dull thing, but Lowell delighted in him, and wouldhave you believe that he was full of quaint humor. 

V. 

While Lowell lived there was a superstition, which has perhaps survivedhim, that he was an indolent man, wasting himself in barren studies andminor efforts instead of devoting his great powers to some monumentalwork worthy of them. If the robust body of literature, both poetry andprose, which lives after him does not yet correct this vain delusion, thetime will come when it must; and in the meantime the delusion cannot vexhim now. I think it did vex him, then, and that he even shared it, andtried at times to meet such shadowy claim as it had. One of the thingsthat people urged upon him was to write some sort of story, and it isknown how he attempted this in verse. It is less known that he attemptedit in prose, and that he went so far as to write the first chapter of anovel. He read this to me, and though I praised it then, I have afeeling now that if he had finished the novel it would have been afailure. "But I shall never finish it, " he sighed, as if he feltirremediable defects in it, and laid the manuscript away, to turn andlight his pipe. It was a rather old-fashioned study of a whimsicalcharacter, and it did not arrive anywhere, so far as it went; but Ibelieve that it might have been different with a Yankee story in versesuch as we have fragmentarily in 'The Nooning' and 'FitzAdam's Story'. Still, his gift was essentially lyrical and meditative, with theuniversal New England tendency to allegory. He was wholly undramatic inthe actuation of the characters which he imagined so dramatically. Heliked to deal with his subject at first hand, to indulge through himselfall the whim and fancy which the more dramatic talent indulges throughits personages. 

He enjoyed writing such a poem as "The Cathedral, " which is not of hisbest, but which is more immediately himself, in all his moods, than somebetter poems. He read it to me soon after it was written, and in thelong walk which we went hard upon the reading (our way led us through thePort far towards East Cambridge, where he wished to show me a tupelo-treeof his acquaintance, because I said I had never seen one), his talk wasstill of the poem which he was greatly in conceit of. Later hissatisfaction with it received a check from the reserves of other friendsconcerning some whimsical lines which seemed to them too great a dropfrom the higher moods of the piece. Their reluctance nettled him;perhaps he agreed with them; but he would not change the lines, and theystand as he first wrote them. In fact, most of his lines stand as hefirst wrote them; he would often change them in revision, and then, in asecond revision go back to the first version. 

He was very sensitive to criticism, especially from those he valuedthrough his head or heart. He would try to hide his hurt, and he wouldnot let you speak of it, as though your sympathy unmanned him, but youcould see that he suffered. This notably happened in my remembrance froma review in a journal which he greatly esteemed; and once when in anotice of my own I had put one little thorny point among the flowers, heconfessed a puncture from it. He praised the criticism hardily, but Iknew that he winced under my recognition of the didactic quality which hehad not quite guarded himself against in the poetry otherwise praised. Heliked your liking, and he openly rejoiced in it; and I suppose he madehimself believe that in trying his verse with his friends he was testingit; but I do not believe that he was, and I do not think he evercorrected his judgment by theirs, however he suffered from it. 

In any matter that concerned literary morals he was more than eager toprofit by another eye. One summer he sent me for the Magazine a poemwhich, when I read it, I trembled to find in motive almost exactly likeone we had lately printed by another contributor. There was nothing forit but to call his attention to the resemblance, and I went over toElmwood with the two poems. He was not at home, and I was obliged toleave the poems, I suppose with some sort of note, for the next morning'spost brought me a delicious letter from him, all one cry of confession, the most complete, the most ample. He did not trouble himself to saythat his poem was an unconscious reproduction of the other; that was forevery reason unnecessary, but he had at once rewritten it upon whollydifferent lines; and I do not think any reader was reminded of Mrs. Akers's "Among the Laurels" by Lowell's "Foot-path. " He was not onlymuch more sensitive of others' rights than his own, but in spite of acertain severity in him, he was most tenderly regardful of theirsensibilities when he had imagined them: he did not always imagine them. 

VI. 

At this period, between the years 1866 and 1874, when he unwillingly wentabroad for a twelvemonth, Lowell was seen in very few Cambridge houses, and in still fewer Boston houses. He was not an unsocial man, but he wasmost distinctly not a society man. He loved chiefly the companionship ofbooks, and of men who loved books; but of women generally he had anamusing diffidence; he revered them and honored them, but he would rathernot have had them about. This is over-saying it, of course, but thetruth is in what I say. There was never a more devoted husband, and hewas content to let his devotion to the sex end with that. He especiallycould not abide difference of opinion in women; he valued their taste, their wit, their humor, but he would have none of their reason. I was byone day when he was arguing a point with one of his nieces, and after ithad gone on for some time, and the impartial witness must have owned thatshe was getting the better of him he closed the controversy by giving hera great kiss, with the words, "You are a very good girl, my dear, " andpractically putting her out of the room. As to women of the flirtatioustype, he did not dislike them; no man, perhaps, does; but he feared them, and he said that with them there was but one way, and that was to run. 

I have a notion that at this period Lowell was more freely and fullyhimself than at any other. The passions and impulses of his youngermanhood had mellowed, the sorrows of that time had softened; he couldblamelessly live to himself in his affections and his sobered ideals. Hiswas always a duteous life; but he had pretty well given up making manover in his own image, as we all wish some time to do, and then no longerwish it. He fulfilled his obligations to his fellow-men as these soughthim out, but he had ceased to seek them. He loved his friends and theirlove, but he had apparently no desire to enlarge their circle. It wasthat hour of civic suspense, in which public men seemed still actuated byunselfish aims, and one not essentially a politician might contentedlywait to see what would come of their doing their best. At any rate, without occasionally withholding open criticism or acclaim Lowell waitedamong his books for the wounds of the war to heal themselves, and thenation to begin her healthfuller and nobler life. With slavery gone, what might not one expect of American democracy!

His life at Elmwood was of an entire simplicity. In the old colonialmansion in which he was born, he dwelt in the embowering leafage, amidthe quiet of lawns and garden-plots broken by few noises ruder than thosefrom the elms and the syringas where

 "The oriole clattered and the cat-bird sang. "

From the tracks on Brattle Street, came the drowsy tinkle of horse-carbells; and sometimes a funeral trailed its black length past the cornerof his grounds, and lost itself from sight under the shadows of thewillows that hid Mount Auburn from his study windows. In the winter thedeep New England snows kept their purity in the stretch of meadow behindthe house, which a double row of pines guarded in a domestic privacy. Allwas of a modest dignity within and without the house, which Lowell lovedbut did not imagine of a manorial presence; and he could not conceal hisannoyance with an over-enthusiastic account of his home in which thesimple chiselling of some panels was vaunted as rich wood-carving. Therewas a graceful staircase, and a good wide hall, from which thedining-room and drawing-room opened by opposite doors; behind the last, in the southwest corner of the house, was his study. 

There, literally, he lived during the six or seven years in which I knewhim after my coming to Cambridge. Summer and winter he sat there amonghis books, seldom stirring abroad by day except for a walk, and by nightyet more rarely. He went to the monthly mid-day dinner of the SaturdayClub in Boston; he was very constant at the fortnightly meetings of hiswhist-club, because he loved the old friends who formed it; he camealways to the Dante suppers at Longfellow's, and he was familiarly in andout at Mr. Norton's, of course. But, otherwise, he kept to his study, except for some rare and almost unwilling absences upon universitylecturing at Johns Hopkins or at Cornell. 

For four years I did not take any summer outing from Cambridge myself, and my associations with Elmwood and with Lowell are more of summer thanof winter weather meetings. But often we went our walks through thesnows, trudging along between the horsecar tracks which enclosed the onlywell-broken-out paths in that simple old Cambridge. I date one memorableexpression of his from such a walk, when, as we were passing Longfellow'shouse, in mid-street, he came as near the declaration of his religiousfaith as he ever did in my presence. He was speaking of the NewTestament, and he said, The truth was in it; but they had covered it upwith their hagiology. Though he had been bred a Unitarian, and had moreand more liberated himself from all creeds, he humorously affected anabiding belief in hell, and similarly contended for the eternalpunishment of the wicked. He was of a religious nature, and he was veryreverent of other people's religious feelings. He expressed a specialtolerance for my own inherited faith, no doubt because Mrs. Lowell wasalso a Swedenborgian; but I do not think he was interested in it, and Isuspect that all religious formulations bored him. In his earlier poemsare many intimations and affirmations of belief in an overrulingprovidence, and especially in the God who declares vengeance His and willrepay men for their evil deeds, and will right the weak against thestrong. I think he never quite lost this, though when, in the last yearsof his life, I asked him if he believed there was a moral government ofthe universe, he answered gravely and with a sort of pain, The scale wasso vast, and we saw such a little part of it. 

As to tine notion of a life after death, I never had any direct orindirect expression from him; but I incline to the opinion that his holdupon this weakened with his years, as it is sadly apt to do with men whohave read much and thought much: they have apparently exhausted theirpotentialities of psychological life. Mystical Lowell was, as every poetmust be, but I do not think he liked mystery. One morning he told methat when he came home the night before he had seen the Doppelganger ofone of his household: though, as he joked, he was not in a state to seedouble. 

He then said he used often to see people's Doppelganger; at another time, as to ghosts, he said, He was like Coleridge: he had seen too many of'em. Lest any weaker brethren should be caused to offend by therestricted oath which I have reported him using in a moment of transportit may be best to note here that I never heard him use any otherimprecation, and this one seldom. 

Any grossness of speech was inconceivable of him; now and then, but onlyvery rarely, the human nature of some story "unmeet for ladies" was toomuch for his sense of humor, and overcame him with amusement which he waswilling to impart, and did impart, but so that mainly the human nature ofit reached you. In this he was like the other great Cambridge men, though he was opener than the others to contact with the commoner life. He keenly delighted in every native and novel turn of phrase, and hewould not undervalue a vital word or a notion picked up out of the roadeven if it had some dirt sticking to it. 

He kept as close to the common life as a man of his patrician instinctsand cloistered habits could. I could go to him with any new find aboutit and be sure of delighting him; after I began making my involuntary andall but unconscious studies of Yankee character, especially in thecountry, he was always glad to talk them over with me. Still, when I haddiscovered a new accent or turn of speech in the fields he hadcultivated, I was aware of a subtle grudge mingling with his pleasure;but this was after all less envy than a fine regret. 

At the time I speak of there was certainly nothing in Lowell's dress orbearing that would have kept the common life aloof from him, if that lifewere not always too proud to make advances to any one. In thisretrospect, I see him in the sack coat and rough suit which he wore uponall out-door occasions, with heavy shoes, and a round hat. I never sawhim with a high hat on till he came home after his diplomatic stay inLondon; then he had become rather rigorously correct in his costume, andas conventional as he had formerly been indifferent. In both epochs hewas apt to be gloved, and the strong, broad hands, which left thesensation of their vigor for some time after they had clasped yours, werenotably white. At the earlier period, he still wore his auburn hairsomewhat long; it was darker than his beard, which was branching andfull, and more straw-colored than auburn, as were his thick eyebrows;neither hair nor beard was then touched with gray, as I now remember. When he uncovered, his straight, wide, white forehead showed itself oneof the most beautiful that could be; his eyes were gay with humor, andalert with all intelligence. He had an enchanting smile, a laugh thatwas full of friendly joyousness, and a voice that was exquisite music. Everything about him expressed his strenuous physical condition: he wouldnot wear an overcoat in the coldest Cambridge weather; at all times hemoved vigorously, and walked with a quick step, lifting his feet wellfrom the ground. 

VII. 

It gives me a pleasure which I am afraid I cannot impart, to linger inthis effort to materialize his presence from the fading memories of thepast. I am afraid I can as little impart a due sense of what hespiritually was to my knowledge. It avails nothing for me to say that Ithink no man of my years and desert had ever so true and constant afriend. He was both younger and older than I by insomuch as he was apoet through and through, and had been out of college before I was born. But he had already come to the age of self-distrust when a man likes totake counsel with his juniors as with his elders, and fancies he cancorrect his perspective by the test of their fresher vision. Besides, Lowell was most simply and pathetically reluctant to part with youth, andwas willing to cling to it wherever he found it. He could not in anywise bear to be left-out. When Mr. Bret Harte came to Cambridge, and thetalk was all of the brilliant character-poems with which he had thenfirst dazzled the world, Lowell casually said, with a most touching, however ungrounded sense of obsolescence, He could remember when the'Biglow Papers' were all the talk. I need not declare that there wasnothing ungenerous in that. He was only too ready to hand down hislaurels to a younger man; but he wished to do it himself. Through themodesty that is always a quality of such a nature, he was magnanimouslysensitive to the appearance of fading interest; he could not take itotherwise than as a proof of his fading power. I had a curious hint ofthis when one year in making up the prospectus of the Magazine for thenext, I omitted his name because I had nothing special to promise fromhim, and because I was half ashamed to be always flourishing it in theeyes of the public. "I see that you have dropped me this year, " hewrote, and I could see that it had hurt, and I knew that he was glad tobelieve the truth when I told him. 

He did not care so much for popularity as for the praise of his friends. If he liked you he wished you not only to like what he wrote, but to sayso. He was himself most cordial in his recognition of the things thatpleased him. What happened to me from him, happened to others, and I amonly describing his common habit when I say that nothing I did to hisliking failed to bring me a spoken or oftener a written acknowledgment. This continued to the latest years of his life when the effort even togive such pleasure must have cost him a physical pang. 

He was of a very catholic taste; and he was apt to be carried away by alittle touch of life or humor, and to overvalue the piece in which hefound it; but, mainly his judgments of letters and men were just. One ofthe dangers of scholarship was a peculiar danger in the Cambridgekeeping, but Lowell was almost as averse as Longfellow from contempt. Hecould snub, and pitilessly, where he thought there was presumption andapparently sometimes merely because he was in the mood; but I cannotremember ever to have heard him sneer. He was often wonderfully patientof tiresome people, and sometimes celestially insensible to vulgarity. Inspite of his reserve, he really wished people to like him; he was keenlyalive to neighborly good-will or ill-will; and when there was a questionof widening Elmwood avenue by taking part of his grounds, he was keenlyhurt by hearing that some one who lived near him had said he hoped thecity would cut down Lowell's elms: his English elms, which his father hadplanted, and with which he was himself almost one blood!

VIII. 

In the period of which I am speaking, Lowell was constantly writing andpretty constantly printing, though still the superstition held that hewas an idle man. To this time belongs the publication of some of hisfinest poems, if not their inception: there were cases in which theirinception dated far back, even to ten or twenty years. He wrote hispoems at a heat, and the manuscript which came to me for the magazine wasusually the first draft, very little corrected. But if the cold fit tookhim quickly it might hold him so fast that he would leave the poem inabeyance till he could slowly live back to a liking for it. 

The most of his best prose belongs to the time between 1866 and 1874, andto this time we owe the several volumes of essays and criticisms called'Among My Books' and 'My Study Windows'. He wished to name these moresoberly, but at the urgence of his publishers he gave them titles whichthey thought would be attractive to the public, though he felt that theytook from the dignity of his work. He was not a good business man in aliterary way, he submitted to others' judgment in all such matters. Idoubt if he ever put a price upon anything he sold, and I dare say he wasusually surprised at the largeness of the price paid him; but sometimesif his need was for a larger sum, he thought it too little, withoutreference to former payments. This happened with a long poem in theAtlantic, which I had urged the counting-room authorities to dealhandsomely with him for. I did not know how many hundred they gave him, and when I met him I ventured to express the hope that the publishers haddone their part. He held up four fingers, "Quattro, " he said in Italian, and then added with a disappointment which he tried to smile away, "Ithought they might have made it cinque. "

Between me and me I thought quattro very well, but probably Lowell had inmind some end which cinque would have fitted better. It was pretty sureto be an unselfish end, a pleasure to some one dear to him, a gift thathe had wished to make. Long afterwards when I had been the means ofgetting him cinque for a poem one-tenth the length, he spoke of thepayment to me. "It came very handily; I had been wanting to give awatch. "

I do not believe at any time Lowell was able to deal with money

 "Like wealthy men, not knowing what they give. "

more probably he felt a sacredness in the money got by literature, whichthe literary man never quite rids him self of, even when he is not apoet, and which made him wish to dedicate it to something finer than theevery day uses. He lived very quietly, but he had by no means more thanhe needed to live upon, and at that time he had pecuniary losses. He waswriting hard, and was doing full work in his Harvard professorship, andhe was so far dependent upon his salary, that he felt its absence for theyear he went abroad. I do not know quite how to express my sense ofsomething unworldly, of something almost womanlike in his relation tomoney. 

He was not only generous of money, but he was generous of himself, whenhe thought he could be of use, or merely of encouragement. He came allthe way into Boston to hear certain lectures of mine on the Italianpoets, which he could not have found either edifying or amusing, that hemight testify his interest in me, and show other people that they wereworth coming to. He would go carefully over a poem with me, word byword, and criticise every turn of phrase, and after all be magnanimouslytolerant of my sticking to phrasings that he disliked. In a certain line

 "The silvern chords of the piano trembled, "

he objected to silvern. Why not silver? I alleged leathern, golden, andlike adjectives in defence of my word; but still he found an affectationin it, and suffered it to stand with extreme reluctance. Another line ofanother piece:

 "And what she would, would rather that she would not"

he would by no means suffer. He said that the stress falling on the lastword made it "public-school English, " and he mocked it with the answer amaid had lately given him when he asked if the master of the house was athome. She said, "No, sir, he is not, " when she ought to have said "No, sir, he isn't. " He was appeased when I came back the next day with thestanza amended so that the verse could read:

 "And what she would, would rather she would not so"

but I fancy he never quite forgave my word silvern. Yet, he professednot to have prejudices in such matters, but to use any word that wouldserve his turn, without wincing; and he certainly did use and defendwords, as undisprivacied and disnatured, that made others wince. 

He was otherwise such a stickler for the best diction that he would nothave had me use slovenly vernacular even in the dialogue in my stories:my characters must not say they wanted to do so and so, but wished, andthe like. In a copy of one of my books which I found him reading, I sawhe had corrected my erring Western woulds and shoulds; as he grew old hewas less and less able to restrain himself from setting people right totheir faces. Once, in the vast area of my ignorance, he specified mysmall acquaintance with a certain period of English poetry, saying, "You're rather shady, there, old fellow. " But he would not have had metoo learned, holding that he had himself been hurt for literature by hisscholarship. 

His patience in analyzing my work with me might have been the easy effortof his habit of teaching; and his willingness to give himself and his ownwas no doubt more signally attested in his asking a brother man ofletters who wished to work up a subject in the college library, to stay afortnight in his house, and to share his study, his beloved study, withhim. This must truly have cost him dear, as any author of fixed habitswill understand. Happily the man of letters was a good fellow, and knewhow to prize the favor-done him, but if he had been otherwise, it wouldhave been the same to Lowell. He not only endured, but did many thingsfor the weaker brethren, which were amusing enough to one in the secretof his inward revolt. Yet in these things he was considerate also of theeditor whom he might have made the sharer of his self-sacrifice, and heseldom offered me manuscripts for others. The only real burden of thekind that he put upon me was the diary of a Virginian who had travelledin New England during the early thirties, and had set down hisimpressions of men and manners there. It began charmingly, and went onvery well under Lowell's discreet pruning, but after a while he seemed tofall in love with the character of the diarist so much that he could notbear to cut anything. 

IX. 

He had a great tenderness for the broken and ruined South, whose sins hefelt that he had had his share in visiting upon her, and he was willingto do what he could to ease her sorrows in the case of any particularSoutherner. He could not help looking askance upon the dramatic shows ofretribution which some of the Northern politicians were working, but withall his misgivings he continued to act with the Republican party untilafter the election of Hayes; he was away from the country during theGarfield campaign. He was in fact one of the Massachusetts electorschosen by the Republican majority in 1816, and in that most painful hourwhen there was question of the policy and justice of counting Hayes infor the presidency, it was suggested by some of Lowell's friends that heshould use the original right of the electors under the constitution, andvote for Tilden, whom one vote would have chosen president over Hayes. After he had cast his vote for Hayes, he quietly referred to the matterone day, in the moment of lighting his pipe, with perhaps the faintesttrace of indignation in his tone. He said that whatever the first intentof the constitution was, usage had made the presidential electorsstrictly the instruments of the party which chose them, and that for himto have voted for Tilden when he had been chosen to vote for Hayes wouldhave-been an act of bad faith. 

He would have resumed for me all the old kindness of our relations beforethe recent year of his absence, but this had inevitably worked a littleestrangement. He had at least lost the habit of me, and that says muchin such matters. He was not so perfectly at rest in the Cambridgeenvironment; in certain indefinable ways it did not so entirely sufficehim, though he would have been then and always the last to allow this. Iimagine his friends realized more than he, that certain delicate butvital filaments of attachment had frayed and parted in alien air, andleft him heart-loose as he had not been before. 

I do not know whether it crossed his mind after the election of Hayesthat he might be offered some place abroad, but it certainly crossed theminds of some of his friends, and I could not feel that I was acting formyself alone when I used a family connection with the President, veryearly in his term, to let him know that I believed Lowell would accept adiplomatic mission. I could assure him that I was writing wholly withoutLowell's privity or authority, and I got back such a letter as I couldwish in its delicate sense of the situation. The President said that hehad already thought of offering Lowell something, and he gave me thepleasure, a pleasure beyond any other I could imagine, of asking Lowellwhether he would accept the mission to Austria. I lost no time carryinghis letter to Elmwood, where I found Lowell over his coffee at dinner. Hesaw me at the threshold, and called to me through the open door to comein, and I handed him the letter, and sat down at table while he ran itthrough. When he had read it, he gave a quick "Ah!" and threw it overthe length of the table to Mrs. Lowell. She read it in a smiling andloyal reticence, as if she would not say one word of all she might wishto say in urging his acceptance, though I could see that she wasintensely eager for it. The whole situation was of a perfect New Englandcharacter in its tacit significance; after Lowell had taken his coffee weturned into his study without further allusion to the matter. 

A day or two later he came to my house to say that he could not acceptthe Austrian mission, and to ask me to tell the President so for him, andmake his acknowledgments, which he would also write himself. He remainedtalking a little while of other things, and when he rose to go, he saidwith a sigh of vague reluctance, "I should like to see a play ofCalderon, " as if it had nothing to do with any wish of his that couldstill be fulfilled. "Upon this hint I acted, " and in due time it wasfound in Washington, that the gentleman who had been offered the Spanishmission would as lief go to Austria, and Lowell was sent to Madrid. 

X. 

When we met in London, some years later, he came almost every afternoonto my lodging, and the story of our old-time Cambridge walks began againin London phrases. There were not the vacant lots and outlying fields ofhis native place, but we made shift with the vast, simple parks, and wewalked on the grass as we could not have done in an American park, andwere glad to feel the earth under our feet. I said how much it was likethose earlier tramps; and that pleased him, for he wished, whenever athing delighted him, to find a Cambridge quality in it. 

But he was in love with everything English, and was determined I shouldbe so too, beginning with the English weather, which in summer cannot beoverpraised. He carried, of course, an umbrella, but he would not put itup in the light showers that caught us at times, saying that the Englishrain never wetted you. The thick short turf delighted him; he wouldscarcely allow that the trees were the worse for foliage blighted by avile easterly storm in the spring of that year. The tender air, thedelicate veils that the moisture in it cast about all objects at theleast remove, the soft colors of the flowers, the dull blue of the lowsky showing through the rifts of the dirty white clouds, the hoveringpall of London smoke, were all dear to him, and he was anxious that Ishould not lose anything of their charm. 

He was anxious that I should not miss the value of anything in England, and while he volunteered that the aristocracy had the corruptions ofaristocracies everywhere, he insisted upon my respectful interest in itbecause it was so historical. Perhaps there was a touch of irony in thisdemand, but it is certain that he was very happy in England. He had comeof the age when a man likes smooth, warm keeping, in which he need makeno struggle for his comfort; disciplined and obsequious service; society, perfectly ascertained within the larger society which we callcivilization; and in an alien environment, for which he was in no wiseresponsible, he could have these without a pang of the self-reproachwhich at home makes a man unhappy amidst his luxuries, when he considerstheir cost to others. He had a position which forbade thought ofunfairness in the conditions; he must not wake because of the slave, itwas his duty to sleep. Besides, at that time Lowell needed all the resthe could get, for he had lately passed through trials such as break thestrength of men, and how them with premature age. He was living alone inhis little house in Lowndes Square, and Mrs. Lowell was in the country, slowly recovering from the effects of the terrible typhus which she hadbarely survived in Madrid. He was yet so near the anguish of thatexperience that he told me he had still in his nerves the expectation ofa certain agonized cry from her which used to rend them. But he said hehad adjusted himself to this, and he went on to speak with a patiencewhich was more affecting in him than in men of more phlegmatictemperament, of how we were able to adjust ourselves to all our trialsand to the constant presence of pain. He said he was never free of acertain distress, which was often a sharp pang, in one of his shoulders, but his physique had established such relations with it that, though hewas never unconscious of it, he was able to endure it without arecognition of it as suffering. 

He seemed to me, however, very well, and at his age of sixty-three, Icould not see that he was less alert and vigorous than he was when Ifirst knew him in Cambridge. He had the same brisk, light step, andthough his beard was well whitened and his auburn hair had grown ashenthrough the red, his face had the freshness and his eyes the clearness ofa young man's. I suppose the novelty of his life kept him from thinkingabout his years; or perhaps in contact with those great, insenescentEnglishmen, he could not feel himself old. At any rate he did not oncespeak of age, as he used to do ten years earlier, and I, then halfthrough my forties, was still "You young dog" to him. It was a brightand cheerful renewal of the early kindliness between us, on which indeedthere had never been a shadow, except such as distance throws. He wishedapparently to do everything he could to assure us of his personalinterest; and we were amused to find him nervously apprehensive of anypurpose, such as was far from us, to profit by him officially. Hebetrayed a distinct relief when he found we were not going to come uponhim even for admissions to the houses of parliament, which we were to seeby means of an English acquaintance. He had not perhaps found some otherfellow-citizens so considerate; he dreaded the half-duties of his place, like presentations to the queen, and complained of the cheap ambitions hehad to gratify in that way. 

He was so eager to have me like England in every way, and seemed so fondof the English, that I thought it best to ask him whether he minded myquoting, in a paper about Lexington, which I was just then going to printin a London magazine, some humorous lines of his expressing the mountingsatisfaction of an imaginary Yankee story-teller who has the old fightterminate in Lord Percy's coming

 "To hammer stone for life in Concord jail. "

It had occurred to me that it might possibly embarrass him to have thispatriotic picture presented to a public which could not take our Fourthof July pleasure in it, and I offered to suppress it, as I did afterwardsquite for literary reasons. He said, No, let it stand, and let them makethe worst of it; and I fancy that much of his success with a people whoare not gingerly with other people's sensibilities came from thefrankness with which he trampled on their prejudice when he chose. Hesaid he always told them, when there was question of such things, thatthe best society he had ever known was in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Hecontended that the best English was spoken there; and so it was, when hespoke it. 

We were in London out of the season, and he was sorry that he could nothave me meet some titles who he declared had found pleasure in my books;when we returned from Italy in the following June, he was prompt to do methis honor. I dare say he wished me to feel it to its last implication, and I did my best, but there was nothing in the evening I enjoyed so muchas his coming up to Mrs. Lowell, at the close, when there was only atitle or two left, and saying to her as he would have said to her atElmwood, where she would have personally planned it, "Fanny, that was afine dinner you gave us. " Of course, this was in a tender burlesque; butit remains the supreme impression of what seemed to me a cloudlesslyhappy period for Lowell. His wife was quite recovered of her longsuffering, and was again at the head of his house, sharing in hispleasures, and enjoying his successes for his sake; successes so greatthat people spoke of him seriously, as "an addition to society" inLondon, where one man more or less seemed like a drop in the sea. She wasa woman perfectly of the New England type and tradition: almostrepellantly shy at first, and almost glacially cold with newacquaintance, but afterwards very sweet and cordial. She was of a darkbeauty with a regular face of the Spanish outline; Lowell was of an idealmanner towards her, and of an admiration which delicately travestieditself and which she knew how to receive with smiling irony. After herdeath, which occurred while he was still in England, he never spoke ofher to me, though before that he used to be always bringing her name in, with a young lover-like fondness. 

XI. 

In the hurry of the London season I did not see so much of Lowell on oursecond sojourn as on our first, but once when we were alone in his studythere was a return to the terms of the old meetings in Cambridge. Hesmoked his pipe, and sat by his fire and philosophized; and but for thegreat London sea swirling outside and bursting through our shelter, anddashing him with notes that must be instantly answered, it was a veryfair image of the past. He wanted to tell me about his coachman whom hehad got at on his human side with great liking and amusement, and therewas a patient gentleness in his manner with the footman who had to keepcoming in upon him with those notes which was like the echo of his youngfaith in the equality of men. But he always distinguished between thesimple unconscious equality of the ordinary American and its assumptionby a foreigner. He said he did not mind such an American's coming intohis house with his hat on; but if a German or Englishman did it, hewanted to knock it off. He was apt to be rather punctilious in his showsof deference towards others, and at one time he practised removing hisown hat when he went into shops in Cambridge. It must have mystified theCambridge salesmen, and I doubt if he kept it up. 

With reference to the doctrine of his young poetry, the fierce and thetender humanity of his storm and stress period, I fancy a kind of bafflein Lowell, which I should not perhaps find it easy to prove. I neverknew him by word or hint to renounce this doctrine, but he could not cometo seventy years without having seen many high hopes fade, and known manyinspired prophecies fail. When we have done our best to make the worldover, we are apt to be dismayed by finding it in much the old shape. Ashe said of the moral government of the universe, the scale is so vast, and a little difference, a little change for the better, is scarcelyperceptible to the eager consciousness of the wholesale reformer. Butwith whatever sense of disappointment, of doubt as to his own deeds fortruer freedom and for better conditions I believe his sympathy was stillwith those who had some heart for hoping and striving. I am sure thatthough he did not agree with me in some of my own later notions for theredemption of the race, he did not like me the less but rather the morebecause (to my own great surprise I confess) I had now and then thecourage of my convictions, both literary and social. 

He was probably most at odds with me in regard to my theories of fiction, though he persisted in declaring his pleasure in my own fiction. He wasin fact, by nature and tradition, thoroughly romantic, and he could notor would not suffer realism in any but a friend. He steadfastly refusedeven to read the Russian masters, to his immense loss, as I tried topersuade him, and even among the modern Spaniards, for whom he might havehad a sort of personal kindness from his love of Cervantes, he chose onefor his praise the least worthy, of it, and bore me down with his heaviermetal in argument when I opposed to Alarcon's factitiousness thedelightful genuineness of Valdes. Ibsen, with all the Norwegians, he putfar from him; he would no more know them than the Russians; the Frenchnaturalists he abhorred. I thought him all wrong, but you do not tryimproving your elders when they have come to three score and ten years, and I would rather have had his affection unbroken by our difference ofopinion than a perfect agreement. Where he even imagined that thisdifference could work me harm, he was anxious to have me know that hemeant me none; and he was at the trouble to write me a letter when aBoston paper had perverted its report of what he said in a public lectureto my disadvantage, and to assure me that he had not me in mind. Whenonce he had given his liking, he could not bear that any shadow of changeshould seem to have come upon him. He had a most beautiful and endearingideal of friendship; he desired to affirm it and to reaffirm it as oftenas occasion offered, and if occasion did not offer, he made occasion. Itdid not matter what you said or did that contraried him; if he thought hehad essentially divined you, you were still the same: and on his part hewas by no means exacting of equal demonstration, but seemed not even towish it. 

XII. 

After he was replaced at London by a minister more immediatelyrepresentative of the Democratic administration, he came home. He made abrave show of not caring to have remained away, but in truth he hadbecome very fond of England, where he had made so many friends, and wherethe distinction he had, in that comfortably padded environment, was soagreeable to him. 

It would have been like him to have secretly hoped that the new Presidentmight keep him in London, but he never betrayed any ignobledisappointment, and he would not join in any blame of him. At our firstmeeting after he came home he spoke of the movement which had made Mr. Cleveland president, and said he supposed that if he had been here, heshould have been in it. All his friends were, he added, a littlehelplessly; but he seemed not to dislike my saying I knew one of hisfriends who was not: in fact, as I have told, he never disliked a plumpdifference--unless he disliked the differer. 

For several years he went back to England every summer, and it was notuntil he took up his abode at Elmwood again that he spent a whole year athome. One winter he passed at his sister's home in Boston, but mostly helived with his daughter at Southborough. I have heard a story of hisgoing to Elmwood soon after his return in 1885, and sitting down in hisold study, where he declared with tears that the place was full ofghosts. But four or five years later it was well for family reasons thathe should live there; and about the same time it happened that I hadtaken a house for the summer in his neighborhood. He came to see me, andto assure me, in all tacit forms of his sympathy in a sorrow for whichthere could be no help; but it was not possible that the old intimaterelations should be resumed. The affection was there, as much on hisside as on mine, I believe; but he was now an old man and I was anelderly man, and we could not, without insincerity, approach each otherin the things that had drawn us together in earlier and happier years. His course was run; my own, in which he had taken such a generouspleasure, could scarcely move his jaded interest. His life, so far as itremained to him, had renewed itself in other air; the later friendshipsbeyond seas sufficed him, and were without the pang, without the effortthat must attend the knitting up of frayed ties here. 

He could never have been anything but American, if he had tried, and hecertainly never tried; but he certainly did not return to the outwardsimplicities of his life as I first knew it. There was no moreround-hat-and-sack-coat business for him; he wore a frock and a high hat, and whatever else was rather like London than Cambridge; I do not knowbut drab gaiters sometimes added to the effect of a gentleman of the oldschool which he now produced upon the witness. Some fastidiousnessesshowed themselves in him, which were not so surprising. He complained ofthe American lower class manner; the conductor and cabman would be kindto you but they would not be respectful, and he could not see the fun ofthis in the old way. Early in our acquaintance he rather stupified me bysaying, "I like you because you don't put your hands on me, " and I heardof his consenting to some sort of reception in those last years, "Yes, ifthey won't shake hands. "

Ever since his visit to Rome in 1875 he had let his heavy mustache growlong till it dropped below the corners of his beard, which was now almostwhite; his face had lost the ruddy hue so characteristic of him. I fancyhe was then ailing with premonitions of the disorder which a few yearslater proved mortal, but he still bore himself with sufficient vigor, andhe walked the distance between his house and mine, though once when Imissed his visit the family reported that after he came in he sat a longtime with scarcely a word, as if too weary to talk. That winter, I wentinto Boston to live, and I saw him only at infrequent intervals, when Icould go out to Elmwood. At such times I found him sitting in the roomwhich was formerly the drawing-room, but which had been joined with hisstudy by taking away the partitions beside the heavy mass of the oldcolonial chimney. He told me that when he was a newborn babe, the nursehad carried him round this chimney, for luck, and now in front of thesame hearth, the white old man stretched himself in an easy-chair, withhis writing-pad on his knees and his books on the table at his elbow, andwas willing to be entreated not to rise. I remember the sun used to comein at the eastern windows full pour, and bathe the air in its warmth. 

He always hailed me gayly, and if I found him with letters newly comefrom England, as I sometimes did, he glowed and sparkled with fresh life. He wanted to read passages from those letters, he wanted to talk abouttheir writers, and to make me feel their worth and charm as he did. Hestill dreamed of going back to England the next summer, but that was notto be. One day he received me not less gayly than usual, but with acertain excitement, and began to tell me about an odd experience he hadhad, not at all painful, but which had very much mystified him. He hadsince seen the doctor, and the doctor had assured him that there wasnothing alarming in what had happened, and in recalling this assurance, he began to look at the humorous aspects of the case, and to make somejokes about it. He wished to talk of it, as men do of their maladies, and very fully, and I gave him such proof of my interest as even invitinghim to talk of it would convey. In spite of the doctor's assurance, andhis joyful acceptance of it, I doubt if at the bottom of his heart therewas not the stir of an uneasy misgiving; but he had not for a long timeshown himself so cheerful. 

It was the beginning of the end. He recovered and relapsed, andrecovered again; but never for long. Late in the spring I came out, andhe had me stay to dinner, which was somehow as it used to be at twoo'clock; and after dinner we went out on his lawn. He got a long-handledspud, and tried to grub up some dandelions which he found in his turf, but after a moment or two he threw it down, and put his hand upon hisback with a groan. I did not see him again till I came out to take leaveof him before going away for the summer, and then I found him sitting onthe little porch in a western corner of his house, with a volume of Scottclosed upon his finger. There were some other people, and our meetingwas with the constraint of their presence. It was natural in nothing somuch as his saying very significantly to me, as if he knew of my heresiesconcerning Scott, and would have me know he did not approve of them, thatthere was nothing he now found so much pleasure in as Scott's novels. Another friend, equally heretical, was by, but neither of us attempted togainsay him. Lowell talked very little, but he told of having been awalk to Beaver Brook, and of having wished to jump from one stone toanother in the stream, and of having had to give it up. He said, withoutcompleting the sentence, If it had come to that with him! Then he fellsilent again; and with some vain talk of seeing him when I came back inthe fall, I went away sick at heart. I was not to see him again, and Ishall not look upon his like. 

I am aware that I have here shown him from this point and from that in aseries of sketches which perhaps collectively impart, but do not assemblehis personality in one impression. He did not, indeed, make oneimpression upon me, but a thousand impressions, which I should seek invain to embody in a single presentment. What I have cloudily before meis the vision of a very lofty and simple soul, perplexed, and as it weresurprised and even dismayed at the complexity of the effects from motivesso single in it, but escaping always to a clear expression of what wasnoblest and loveliest in itself at the supreme moments, in the divineexigencies. I believe neither in heroes nor in saints; but I believe ingreat and good men, for I have known them, and among such men Lowell wasof the richest nature I have known. His nature was not always serene orpellucid; it was sometimes roiled by the currents that counter and crossin all of us; but it was without the least alloy of insincerity, and itwas never darkened by the shadow of a selfish fear. His genius was aninstrument that responded in affluent harmony to the power that made hima humorist and that made him a poet, and appointed him rarely to be quiteeither alone. 

ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:

 I believe neither in heroes nor in saints It is well to hold one's country to her promises Liked being with you, not for what he got, but for what he gave