Born, at Cambridge, Mass., 22 Feb. 1819. Early education with tutor. To Harvard Univ., 1834; B.A., 1838; LL.B., 1840. Called to Bar, 1840. Soon devoted himself to literature. Married (i) Maria White, 26 Dec. 1844. Active in support of Abolition of Slavery. Contrib. “Biglow Papers” to “Boston Courier,” 1846–48. Part editor of “The Pioneer,” 1843. Corresponding editor of “National Anti-Slavery Standard,” 1848. Contrib. to “Dial,” “Democratic Rev.,” “Mass. Quarterly Rev.;” to “Putnam’s Monthly” from 1853. Visit to Europe, 1851–52. Wife died, 1853. Prof. of Mod. Languages, Harvard, Jan. 1855. Married (ii) Frances Dunlap, Sept. 1857. Edited “Atlantic Monthly” from 1857–62; part editor of “North American Rev.,” 1863–72. Visit to Europe, 1872–75. Hon. D.C.L., Oxford, 18 June 1873. Hon. LL.D., Camb., 1874. U.S.A. Ambassador in Madrid, 1877–80; in London, 1880–85. Hon. LL.D., Edinburgh, 1884. Hon. LL.D., Harvard, St. Andrews, and Bologna. Returned to America, 1885. Died, 12 Aug. 1891. Works: “Class Poem,” 1838; “A Year’s Life,” 1841; “Poems,” 1844 (3rd edn. same year); “The Vision of Sir Launfal,” 1845; “Conversations on Some of the Old Poets,” 1845; “Reader! Walk up at Once!… A Fable for Critics” (anon.), 1848; “The Biglow Papers” (anon.), 1st series, 1848; 2nd series, 1867; “Poems” (2 vols.), 1849; “Poetical Works” (2 vols.), 1858; “Mason and Slidell,” 1862; “Fireside Travels,” 1864; “The President’s Policy,” 1864; “Ode recited at the Commemoration of the Living and Dead Soldiers of Harvard University,” 1865; “Under the Willows,” 1869 [1868]; “My Study Windows,” 1870; “The Cathedral,” 1870; “Among my Books,” 1st series, 1870; 2nd series, 1876; “The Courtier,” 1874; “Three Memorial Poems,” 1876; “Favourite Poems,” 1877; “A Moosehead Journal,” 1877; “Works” (5 vols.), 1881; “Democracy, and Other Addresses,” 1887; “Richard III. and the Primrose Criticism,” 1887; “Heartsease and Rue,” 1888; “Political Essays,” 1888; “Address” [to American Mod. Language Soc.], 1890. Posthumous: “Last Literary Essays and Addresses,” ed. by C. E. Norton, 1891; “The Old English Dramatists,” 1892; “Letters,” ed. by C. E. Norton, 1895 [1894]; “Last Poems,” ed. by C. E. Norton, 1895. He edited: Keats’ Poems, 1854; Shelley’s Poems, 1875. Collected Works: in 10 vols., 1890–91.

Personal

  Among all the authors whose homes are noticed in this series, Lowell is the only one who has the fortune to reside in the house in which he was born. It is a happiness which few Americans of mature age can know. But Lowell has been peculiarly happy in his domestic relations; Nature has endowed him with a vigorous constitution and a healthy and happy temperament; and, but for the loss of his three children, the youngest of whom, his only boy, died recently in Rome, there would have been fewer shadows on his path than have fallen to the lot of most other poets. A nature like his can make its own sunshine, and find an oasis in every desert; yet it was a rare fortune that he found himself in such a home as his imagination would have created for him, if he had been cast homeless upon the world. He loves to throw a purple light over the familiar scene, and to invest it with a superfluousness of grateful gilding.

  I have now been a week at Cambridge with the Lowells; they will have me stay, and I am quite willing to stay, because I am well off to my heart’s content in this excellent and agreeable home. The house and a small quantity of land which surrounds it belong to the father of the poet, Dr. Lowell, a handsome old man, universally beloved and respected, and the oldest minister in Massachusetts. The whole family assembles every day for morning and evening prayers around the venerable old man, and he it is who blesses every meal. With him live his youngest son, the poet, and his wife; such a handsome and happy young couple as one can hardly imagine. He is full of life and youthful ardor; she, as gentle, as delicate, and as fair as a lily, and one of the most lovable women that I have seen in this country, because her beauty is full of soul and grace, as is everything which she does or says. The young couple belong to the class of those of whom one can be quite sure; one could not for an hour, nay, not for half an hour, be doubtful of them. She, like him, has a poetical tendency, and has also written, anonymously, some poems, remarkable for their deep and tender feeling, especially maternal, but her mind has more philosophical depth than his. Singularly enough, I did not discern in him that deeply earnest spirit which charmed me in many of his poems. He seems to me occasionally to be brilliant, witty, gay, especially in the evening, when he has what he calls his “evening fever,” and his talk is then like an incessant play of fireworks. I find him very agreeable and amiable; he seems to have many friends, mostly young men. As one of his merits, I reckon his being so fascinated by his little wife, because I am so myself. There is a trace of beauty and taste in everything she touches, whether of mind or body; and above all, she beautifies life.

  In person Lowell is of medium height, rather slender, but sinewy and active. His movements are deliberate rather than impulsive, indicating what athletes call staying qualities. His hair at maturity was dark auburn or ruddy chestnut in color, and his full beard rather lighter and more glowing in tint…. Lowell’s eyes in repose have clear blue and gray tones, with minute dark mottlings. In expression they are strongly indicative of his moods. When fixed upon study, or while listening to serious discourse, they are grave and penetrating; in ordinary conversation they are bright and cheery; in moments of excitement they have a wonderful lustre. Nothing could be finer than his facial expression while telling a story or tossing a repartee. The features are alive with intelligence; and eyes, looks, and voice appear to be working up dazzling effects in concert, like the finished artists of the Comédie Française.

  There is a truely diverting gaucherie, an unsurpassable left-handness, in the compliments which a full five-sixths of Mr. Lowell’s admirers in English society have been almost avowedly paying to him. They have most of them a certain acquaintance, not with his works—for in that respect a hackneyed gnome or two of Birdofredum Sawin’s constitutes their whole equipment—but with the high estimation in which he is held by all competent English critics who really are familiar with Mr. Lowell’s writings, serious as well as comic, prose as well as verse; and hearing him spoken of by these authorities with “for all the world, as much respect as if he were an Englishman,” they ran at once into an excess of that sort of admiration which loses all its flattering quality in disclosing too large and obvious an admixture of surprise. The attitude of these foolish people towards this veteran man of letters, this highly-trained critic and most finished literary artist, would really almost remind one of the demeanor of some simple but unlettered father towards a clever son.

  Lowell has conferred such honors upon his country that all Americans will gladly unite in the “Well Done” that greets him, from every quarter, on his return to his home.

  I know of no instance, ancient or modern, of an equal combination of poetical power and eminence with the successful administration of high national and political trusts. He has delighted and honored us, and we honor ourselves in honoring him.

  As a conversationalist Mr. Lowell is unrivalled. His wit is apparently inexhaustible, and irradiates his whole conversation, as it does all his writing except his serious poetry. His “Fireside Travels” was pronounced by Bryant the wittiest book ever written; and it is not more witty than much of his conversation. The brilliancy of his conversation and the charm of his manners unite to make him one of the most fascinating companions in the world; and this charm is felt by all who come in contact with the man, and is not a thing reserved for his more favored companions. One who has witnessed an encounter of wit between Lowell and Dr. Holmes has witnessed one of the finest exhibitions of mental pyrotechnics of the day. His reading has been wide and varied, and he has all his resources at command. His observation of men and things has also been keen, and every variety of anecdote and illustration come forth from apparently inexhaustible sources as the needs of the moment demand.

  The attachment of its owner to these “paternal acres” is sufficient to explain why when others left Cambridge in summer—and then it is as quiet as Pisa—he still found it “good enough country” for him; but besides this affection for the soil, the landscape itself has a charm that would content a poet. To the rear of this room, or rather of its chimney, for there was no partition, was another, whose windows showed the grove and shrubbery at the back toward the hill; and this view was perhaps the more peaceful. Here in these two rooms were the usual furnishings of a scholar’s study—tables and easy-chairs, pictures and pipes, the whole lending itself to an effect of lightness and simplicity, with the straw-matting islanded with books and (especially in the further room) strewn with scholar’s litter, from the midst of which one day the poet, in search of “what might be there,” drew from nearly under my feet the manuscript of Clough’s “Amours de Voyage.” The books filled the shelves upon the wall everywhere, and a library more distinctly gathered for the mere love of literature is not to be found. It is not large as libraries go—some four thousand volumes. To tell its treasures would be to catalogue the best works of man in many languages.

  Lowell entered Harvard in his sixteenth year, and he has said of himself that he read everything except the text-books prescribed by the Faculty. He was graduated in the class of 1838, and then entered the Law School, intending, like Oliver Wendell Holmes, to become a lawyer. He even went so far as to open a law office in Boston, but it is more than suspected that one of his early attempts at fiction, bearing the title of “My First Client,” referred to an entirely imaginary person. “The old melodious lays” were still more fascinating to him than the law-books bound up in yellow sheepskin, and his circumstances were so easy that he was not forced to continue work that was distasteful to him. He published a little book of verse, and when he was twenty-four he started a magazine; but, though neither the book nor the magazine met with success, he soon afterward proved that by the closing of the little office and Blackstone’s “Commentaries,” literature had gained more than law had lost.

  Of all the literary diplomats whom the United States have honored themselves by sending out to represent them, none has ever enjoyed a more brilliant reception. The services of the American minister were in constant demand upon occasions requiring literary or commemorative addresses. He responded with the best efforts of a singularly cultivated and astonishingly fertile mind; and America was proud of an envoy who with so much dignity and so obvious success represented not only her government, but the highest achievements of her civilization.

  In courage, in truthfulness, in everything he was the type of the Puritan idea in its most bracing expression, as Hawthorne (a man of rarer and finer genius) is a type of fervid Puritanism on its most unhealthy side. His courage, his honesty, his proud uncompromising independence, were all his own, but Puritanism fostered them. With all his love of England, America did not hold a more loyal son than he. In her glorious destiny he had a faith as strong as it was wise. Though for many years America has been peculiarly happy in the ministers she has sent to St. James’s, never did she send a nobler son than Lowell, and never was he more loyal than at the very moment when he was saying those kind words about England which angered certain Americans whose loyalty to their country means “bumptiousness,” or else a selfish hardening of the national conscience. Delightful as was personal intercourse with him, the charm was not quite undisturbed. Every now and then you felt yourself to be under the microscope of a Yankee naturalist. You felt that you were being examined, weighed, and classified for America, perhaps for Boston. It is this sagacity that gives life to his prose. What is called his wit is merely this almost preternatural sagacity in rapid movement. What is called his humour is this same sagacity at rest and in a meditative mood.

  Many good Americans do we meet in letters and in the world, but Mr. Lowell was the flower of them all; in all that he did, wrote and said giving the world assurance of a man. Culture could not make him fanciful or unduly fastidious, nor the study of letters diminish his robust interest in and knowledge of public affairs. Yes, he was of the great race, was of mightier mould than the literary generations of to-day; had a genius at once sure, powerful, and kindly, without freak or paradox or doubt. Mr. Lowell’s religious faith (if one may mention such matters) had a solidity and fervor which surprised some and might well convert others of a wavering temper. I know that I cannot praise him to the measures of his desert, nor bear adequate testimony to the qualities which we knew and admired and loved, and yet it is difficult to be silent in our regret tam cari capitis.

  The biographers of James Russell Lowell are already pointing out that the main direction of his life was determined by a woman. So many men of genius have been shipwrecked in marriage that it is good to dwell on the signal cases of the contrary result. When Lowell first formed his attachment of Maria White, he was unquestionably at the parting of the ways. He came from college popular and brilliant indeed, perilously brilliant—with strong literary instincts, but morally immature. His suspension from college on the eve of graduation did not come, as is now charitably suggested, from irregularity in attendance on prayers, but from a more serious offense, indicating a more dangerous possibility. That he was saved from the reckless career of so many gifted men was partly due, of course, to his own better nature, but largely to that strongest influence which can be brought to bear on a young man of ardent impulses, a pure love towards a noble woman.

  His heart was not with our monarchical traditions; it was always sternly Republican. Lowell in England was always looking longingly backward to the vast wooden mansion under the terrace of Mount Auburn where he was born and bred, and where the great writers of the world laid their hands upon his youth and dedicated it. It is much to be desired that the American Government, or the State of Massachusetts, may find some way of preserving Elmwood as it stands, or as it stood when I saw it six years ago, as national property. More, perhaps, than any other single building in America, it is a relic of the literary life, a solid piece of the intellectual history, of the country. Mr. Lowell, though ten years absent from Elmwood, was always thinking of it, and especially of the famous trees that deepen the seclusion of its lawns. I remember, when I first saw him, after a brief visit to America in 1885, he asked me immediately about the elms at Mount Auburn. “Did they send me a message?” he asked. Long may their venerable shadow be thrown across his household gods!

  I knew Mr. Lowell very well in the early years of the Civil War, when I lived near him in Cambridge. It was a rare delight to a young man to sit in this poet’s disordered library and enjoy the sparkle of his rambling talk about books, and men, and courts (which he used to give forth without stint), meanwhile enjoying with him a long pipe-smoke. Mr. Lowell was at once genial and dignified. His greeting was cordial always, but it was one which forbade familiarity. His air was always one of distinction, and it needs not to be said that his talk was redolent of a rich and ripe scholarship, which was at once appreciative and critical. Nothing could be more infectious than was his enthusiasm for old writers; and especially, I think, he liked to set forth the literary virtues of the Elizabethan dramatists.

  I think it will be generally conceded that, at the time of his death, Mr. Lowell occupied the position of the foremost American citizen. In public regard, at home and abroad, his name naturally headed the list of prominent Americans. Looked upon as a man of letters, as a representative of our country in foreign lands, or in any of the various positions in which he appeared before the public, there was no one to whom it was the custom to name James Russell Lowell as second. Without occupying the highest rank in any of his vocations, he stood in front of his fellow-citizens because he held so high a rank in so many of them.

  It may be professional prejudice, but as the whole color of his life was literary, so it seems to me that we may see in his high and happy fortune the most substantial honor gathered by the practice of letters from a world preoccupied with other things. It was in looking at him as a man of letters that one got closest to him, and some of his more fanatical friends are not to be deterred from regarding his career as in the last analysis a tribute to the dominion of style. This is the idea that his name most promptly evokes, to my sense; and though it was not by any means the only idea he cherished, the unity of his career is surely to be found in it. He carried style—the style of literature—into regions in which we rarely look for it; into politics, of all places in the world, into diplomacy, into stammering civic dinners and ponderous anniversaries, into letters and notes and telegrams, into every turn of the hour—absolutely into conversation, where indeed it freely disguised itself as intensely colloquial wit.

  With his lofty patriotism and his extraordinary public conscience, Lowell was distinctly the Independent in politics. He was an American and a Republican citizen. He acted with parties as every citizen must act if he acts at all. But the notion that a voter is a traitor to one party when he votes with another was as ludicrous to him as the assertion that it is treason to the White Star steamer to take passage in a Cunarder. When he would know his public duty, Lowell turned within, not without. He listened, not for the roar of the majority in the street, but for the still small voice in his own breast. For while the method of republican government is party, its basis is individual conscience and common-sense. This entire political independence Lowell always illustrated.

  In my Junior year, a lecture of Professor Norton’s excited in me a wish to read Dante under Mr. Lowell. I did not know a word of Italian, though; and I was firmly resolved to waste no more time on elementary grammar. Without much hope of a favorable reception, then, I applied for admission to the course. Mr. Lowell received me in one of the small recitation-rooms in the upper story of University Hall. My first impression was that he was surprisingly hirsute, and a little eccentric in aspect. He wore a double-breasted sack-coat, by no means new. In his necktie, which was tied in a sailor-knot, was a pin—an article of adornment at that time recently condemned by an authority which some of us were then disposed to accept as gospel. On his desk lay a silk hat not lately brushed; and nobody, I then held, had any business to wear a silk hat unless he wore coat-tails, too…. His method of teaching was all his own. The class was small—not above ten or a dozen; and he generally began by making each student translate a few lines, interrupting now and then with suggestions of the poetic value of passages which were being rendered in a style too exasperatingly prosaic. Now and again, some word or some passage would suggest to him a line of thought—sometimes very earnest, sometimes paradoxically comical—that it would never have suggested to anyone else, and he would lean back in his chair, and talk away across country till he felt like stopping; or he would thrust his hands into the pockets of his rather shabby sack-coat, and pace the end of the room with his heavy laced boots, and look at nothing in particular, and discourse of things in general. We gave up note-books in a week. Our business was not to cram lifeless detail, but to absorb as much as we might of the spirit of his exuberant literary vitality. And through it all he was always a quiz; you never knew what he was going to do or to say next.

  He was full of life and animal spirits. The “Fables for Critics” published in 1848, affords ample illustration of the liveliness and sparkling spontaneity of his wits, as well as of his critical discrimination and the wide range of his reading. His spirits were constantly bubbling over in action as well as in writing. He enjoyed life thoroughly and in all its aspects. His bodily faculties were all at command, and served him well. He was no trained athlete, but he liked walking and swimming and skating, and could endure fatigue without harm. His eye was keen and true, his hand steady. He was a good shot, and he knew the excitement of the hunt, but he cared too much for the wild creatures to find great pleasure in killing them. To excel in everything he undertook was become a habit and an ambition with him. It was so in feats of bodily agility and strength. He liked to do whatever any one else could do. But he admired generously those who surpassed him. There was no jealousy in his nature…. Every pleasant quality that adds charm to social intercourse made Lowell among his intimates one of the most delightful of companions. His wit was as kindly as it was ready; his humour was always genial…. His tastes, his disposition, were aristocratic, but his principles, his faith, and his practice were thoroughly democratic…. His affections were singularly deep and steady. He had not only a tender but a very large heart. His love for his friends was such that at times if it did not blind it at least colored his judgment. He was sure to like what they did. He was to them all that a faithful and generous friend could be. His thoughtfulness for them, his readiness to take trouble for them and to put all his resources at their disposal, outwent the common rules and experience of friendship…. There was a vein of shyness in him which, associated with this self-distrust, made appearance before the public distasteful to him. It was not till late in life that the evidence of his success and effect as a public speaker became too clear to allow him any longer to question his abilities in this respect. During the twenty years of his professorship its duties never became easy to him. He fulfilled them with scrupulous fidelity, but the stated hours and seasons of work were irksome to him and averse from his natural inclinations.

  He had a power of enjoyment which was not Yankee, a power of enjoyment both mental and physical. He liked good food, drink, and tobacco, and was altogether very fond of the earth. He sometimes spoke of this quality and said that he had upon his ear a mark which is peculiar to the ear of the faun.

  A short walk under the arching elms of Brattle Street brings us to Elmwood, the life-long home of Lowell. The house, erected by the last British lieutenant-governor of the province, is a plain, square structure of wood, three stories in height, and is surrounded by a park of simple and natural beauty, whose abundant growth of trees gives to some portions of the grounds the sombreness and apparent seclusion of a forest. A gigantic hedge of trees encloses the place like a leafy wall, excluding the vision of the world and harboring thousands of birds who tenant its shades. Some of the aquatic fowl of the vicinage are referred to in Longfellow’s “Herons of Elmwood.” In the old mansion, long the home of Elbridge Gerry, Lowell was born and grew to manhood, and to it he brought the bride of his youth, the lovely Maria White, herself the writer of some exquisite poems; here, a few years later, she died…. Here, where he wished to die, he died, and here his daughter preserves his former home and its contents unchanged since he was borne hence to his burial. Until the death of his father, Lowell’s study was an upper front room at the left of the entrance. It is a plain, low-studded corner apartment, which the poet called “his garret,” and where he slept as a boy. Its windows now look only into the neighboring trees, but when autumn has shorn the boughs of their foliage the front window commands a wide level of the sluggish Charles and its bordering lowlands, while the side window overlooks the beautiful slopes of Mount Auburn, where Lowell now lies with his poet-wife and the children who went before. His study windows suggested the title of his most interesting volume of prose essays. In this upper chamber he wrote his “Conversations on the Poets” and the early poems which made his fame,—“Irene,” “Prometheus,” “Rhœcus,” “Sir Launfal,”—which was composed in five days,—and the first series of that collection of grotesque drolleries, “The Biglow Papers.” Here also he prepared his editorial contributions to the “Atlantic.” His later study was on the lower floor, at the left of the ample hall which traverses the centre of the house. It is a prim and delightful old-fashioned apartment, with low walls, a wide and cheerful fireplace, and pleasant windows which look out among the trees and lilacs upon a long reach of lawn. In this room the poet’s best-loved books, copiously annotated by his hand, remain upon his shelves; here we see his table, his accustomed chair, the desk upon which he wrote the “Commemoration Ode,” “Under the Willows,” and many famous poems, besides the volumes of prose essays.

  It was not long after his return from his position as minister to England; and, having made an appointment with him beforehand, I called on him in his home at Elmwood. He received me in his study, the large square room on the first floor, at the left of the entrance. Those who have seen him there will be familiar with the room, ideal in its arrangements, as the study of a poet…. As I remember the way in which he received me, the quiet ease with which he made me perfectly at home, it may be proper for me to say a word concerning Lowell’s general attitude toward the public. He was by birth and training an aristocrat in the best sense of that word. He never found it easy to make his life a common, to be freely entered and trodden down at random by all the world. He was not so easily accessible as Longfellow; he claimed that he had a right to his own time, his intimacies, and his friendships. But to those who knew him, to those to whom he opened his arms and his heart, he was the most delightful of companions. He has been severely criticised for the attitude of dignity and reserve which he took and maintained while he was our minister at the Court of St. James; and it is freely admitted that he was not one of those who liked to be slapped on the back by everybody, and that he was not willing to be made an errand boy or a London guide for wandering Americans. But no man who ever occupied a diplomatic position in Europe has ever stood more steadily for the essential principles of our republic, maintained more uncompromisingly the dignity of an American citizen, or reflected more credit on his country.

  I remember when the papers announced that our plain Harvard professor had been appointed Minister to England we boys thought of the big shaggy dog that tagged him through the street, of the briar-wood pipe, and the dusty suit of gray, and we were struck dumb with amazement.

  He came to London the man he had been all his life long—a man of books and of literature, a thinker, a dreamer, a poet, almost a recluse. The world for which he most cared lay within the four walls of his library at Elmwood. He valued his friends—never was there a friend more loyal and stanch to his friends than Lowell; but, his friends excepted, men seemed to him more real or more near to him in their writings than in the flesh. With all his geniality he was extremely reserved with strangers or acquaintances in his own rank of life. He was an American with the culture of Europe, but with no great knowledge of the Europe of to-day outside of its literature and art…. For rank or for mere brilliancy of social position he never cared. He was supposed to care, or accused of caring, by those sour critics at home who find it agreeable to believe that an American of the Americans, as Lowell always was, is dazzled by the social splendors of London. But Lowell, always a student of human nature in books, now became a student of human nature in the flesh. He frankly avowed his astonishment at finding so many good specimens in regions hitherto unsuspected and unexplored. He saw that London society was, in truth, a kind of microcosm, or the whole world in little; a place where you had to make and keep your own footing…. His impatience of pretentious ignorance was, in truth, uncontrollable, and he became almost at once so great a figure in London that to him was tacitly accorded a license granted to none other. With this social supremacy his diplomatic quality had little or nothing to do…. The imagination cannot conceive of Lowell as a courtier. He had—which is a totally different matter—an admirable courtesy, whether to the Queen or to the flower-girl in the street of whom he bought roses for his button-hole and his friends. But to the Queen, as to everybody else, he would speak his mind. The freedom he used sometimes left courtiers aghast, but gave no offense to the Queen. It may have amazed her because of its originality; it certainly increased her respect and liking for the loyal gentleman who thought the ties of humanity universal. There was no fault of good-breeding in it; there was, no doubt, a certain indifference to court customs. A breath of fresh air swept through the presence-room when Mr. Lowell entered it. He was not afraid to be himself; to be simple, entertaining, literary even, or to pour out his stores of wit and learning where such gifts are unusual.

  Mr. Lowell was singularly handsome in his young manhood. Paige painted him when he was a Titian young man with reddish beard and affluent curling hair, deep blue eyes, and a ruddy cheek. Afterwards, when he was Minister to England, I spoke to him of that portrait and those days. “You see,” said he, “I didn’t grow old handsomely.” Nor did he. The trials of his life, and they were many, had marked his face and marred his coloring; but it made no difference how he looked, he was always the same delightful, witty, and distinguished man.

  Soon after he was first married, Mrs. Lowell wrote to Mrs. Hawthorne, “I begin to fear we shall not have the satisfaction of being so very poor, after all.” At times her fears were not realized, but they were the times when Lowell, in letters to his friends, could give the most amusing accounts of his condition. Once when he was in Europe he told his bankers to let him know when his money was spent, for then he meant to go home. He had no accounts of his own to tell him, and an error in the banker’s accounts brought his visit prematurely to an end. But in later years the bankers made good this disappointment by a profitable investment of the sum which really had remained to his credit, and Lowell made the incident a text for a humourous denunciation of all accounts and figures. Humourous and enthusiastic, companionable and sympathetic, he was the best of friends, and the life of congenial assemblies.

  My experience (that is, at Harvard), therefore, only permits me to speak of him as a professor in the recitation-room. In that relation his erudition, humor, and kindness made me, and I am sure all my associates, enjoy the hour with him as we did no other college exercise. I can sincerely say that it is one of my most highly cherished experiences. With us he was always conversational, and flattered us and gained us by an assumption that what interested him interested us. When now I take up my Dante, Mr. Lowell seems to be with me.

  Lowell first saw Maria White on the first of December, 1839. At the moment, I suppose, he did not know that it was preordained that they two should be one. Mr. Norton has hunted out an early letter of his which he wrote the day after that meeting: “I went up to Watertown on Saturday with W. A. White, and spent the Sabbath with him…. His sister is a very pleasant and pleasing young lady, and knows more poetry than any one I am acquainted with. I mean, she is able to repeat more. She is more familiar, however, with modern poets than with the pure wellsprings of English poesy.” The truth is that their union was made in heaven, that it was a perfect marriage, that they belonged together and lived one life. She was exquisitely beautiful; her tastes and habits were perfectly simple; her education, as I look back on what I know of it, seems to me as perfect as any education can be.

  Mr. Lowell brought letters to my father, Don Pascual de Gayangos, a valued friend and correspondent of Prescott and Ticknor. We saw much of him. My father’s fine library was a great resource to him, and hardly a day passed without one or more notes, or “notelets,” passing between us. I am the happy possessor of one hundred and seventy-three of them, full of fun, and with comments on passing events and on the books which came to him from America and England…. He liked Spain, and looked with indulgence at our faults. The picturesqueness pleased him, and the tawny landscapes and the snow-covered mountains of Guadarrama were a delight to him…. He spoke much of the trees and birds that surrounded Elmwood, which were so dear to him and his wife. How thankful we must be that he closed his eyes in the home he loved so well!

  He was very sensitive to criticism, especially from those he valued through his head or heart. He would try to hide his hurt, and he would not let you speak of it, as though your sympathy unmanned him, but you could see that he suffered. This notably happened in my remembrance from a review in a journal which he greatly esteemed; and once when in a notice of my own I put one little thorny point among the flowers, he confessed a puncture from it. He praised the criticism heartily, but I knew that he winced under my recognition of the didactic quality which he had not quite guarded himself against in the poetry otherwise praised. He liked your liking, and he openly rejoiced in it; and I suppose he made himself believe that in trying his verse with his friends he was testing it; but I do not believe that he was, and I do not think that he ever corrected his judgment by theirs, however he suffered from it…. Any grossness of speech was inconceivable of him; now and then, but only very rarely, the human nature of some story “unmeet for ladies” was too much for his sense of humor, and overcame him with amusement which he was willing to impart, and did impart, but so that mainly the human nature of it 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 he would not undervalue a vital word or notion picked up out of the road even if it had some mud sticking to it. He kept as close to the common life as a man of his patrician and cloistered habits could…. 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 say so. He was himself most cordial in his recognition of the things that pleased him. What happened to me from him, happened to others, and I am only describing his common habit when I say that nothing I did to his liking failed to bring me a spoken or oftener a written acknowledgment. This continued to the latest years of his life when the effort to give pleasure must have caused him a physical pang.

  Holmes and Lowell were the antithesis of the New England intellect, and this more in their personality than in their writing. If Lowell could have acquired Holmes’s respect for his work, he would have left a larger image in the American Walhalla; but he never gave care to the perfection of what he wrote, for his mind so teemed with material that the time to polish and review never came. Holmes, like a true artist, loved the limae labor. He was satisfied, it seemed to me, to do the work of one lifetime and then rest, while Lowell looked forward to a succession of lifetimes all full of work, and one can hardly conceive him as ever resting or caring to stop work. Lowell’s was a generous, widely sympathizing nature, from which radiated love for humanity and the broadest and most catholic helpfulness for every one who asked for his help, with a special fund for his friends. Holmes drew a line around him, within which he shone like a winter sun, and outside of which his care did not extend. The one was best in what he did, the other in what he was. Holmes always seemed to me cynical to the general world; Lowell to have embodied the antique sentiment, “I am a man, and hold nothing human as indifferent to me.” Both were adored by those around them, and the adoration kindled Holmes to a warmer reflection to the adorers; Lowell felt it as the earth feels sunshine, which sinks into the fertile soil and bears its fruit in a richer harvest.

  The spring of 1891 came and Lowell had cheerful hope of further work…. But though he could go out but little, he had a pleasant glimpse of the world that lay about his house,—the earliest and the best known world to him. He had had a flat dish with stones in it conveniently placed in his garden, and connected it with his water pipe so that his little friends the thrushes, the orioles, and the squirrels might have free use of the modern improvements to which he was indifferent enough. Outside of his bedroom window a pair of gray squirrels had nested, and as he was imprisoned there by the illness which now closed in about him, he looked with kindly interest on their gambols in the tree-tops. His friends came as he could see them, and he entertained them with humorous diatribes on his gaoler gout. Now and then he could pencil a letter or note, sending a message perhaps to some equally bound sufferer, as when he commiserated his old friend Judge Hoar, shut up with an attack of inflammatory rheumatism, and whimsically cautioned him against mistaking it for the gout which he himself was enduring. A faint smile plays about these last expressions of his kindly nature, as he seems to wave the world aside that he may take his friends by the hand. Death found him cheerful, and he passed away in the middle of the bright summer.

A Fable for Critics, 1848

  Passed an hour or two with Lowell, who read to me his satire on American authors; full of fun, and with very true portraits, as seen from that side.

  No failure was ever more complete or more pitiable. By the publication of a book at once so ambitious and so feeble, so malevolent in design and so harmless in execution, a work so roughly and clumsily yet so weakly constructed, so very different in body and spirit from anything that he has written before, Mr. Lowell has committed an irrevocable faux pas and lowered himself at least fifty per cent in the literary public opinion.

  Common rumour attributes it to the same pen which wrote “The Biglow Papers,” and if there was no other reason for this conjecture but the author’s extraordinary command of Hudibrastic rhymes, and the easy flow of his versification, we should think it must be well founded. The “Fable,” which, by the way, is no fable at all, is really a very pleasant and sparkling poem, abounding in flashes of brilliant satire, edged with wit enough to delight even its victims. It is far more spirited and entertaining than one would expect from the labored conceits of its title-page and preface, which, with their forced and concealed jingle, are but melancholy introductions for the lively and half-grotesque rhymes that follow. The framework of the poem is too slight to merit notice; the writer evidently began with some idea of a plot or an apologue, but soon tired of it, and throwing the reins upon the neck of his Pegasus, allowed the verse to “wander at its own sweet will.” Goldsmith’s “Retaliation” was certainly his model, and though he comes far short of that exquisite mixture of playful satire and discriminating portraiture of character, under which the good-nature of the kind-hearted poet appears so constantly that not one of his glittering shafts leaves a painful wound, he quite equals it in the easy flow of his rhymes, and surpasses it in wit and sauciness.

  The whole, despite its rollicking style and its friendly tone, leaving upon the mind no impression that American literature in 1848 was hopelessly sentimental or likely to remain immature for too long a period. At any rate, there was enough of it to deserve the attention of a critic who knew when to denounce, when to correct, and when to praise, and who could prove, in a single work, the fallacy of the old idea that a critic is a broken-down creator.

  I think that the “Fable for Critics,” in which, with such keen intuition, he gave a critical estimate of the merits and defects of his most eminent fellow-countrymen, has been under-estimated rather than otherwise. It was marked not only by its sparkling and acute playfulness, and the clever oddity of rhymes in which even Browning has not surpassed him, but also by a very unusual power of seeing the real men through the glamour of temporary popularity and the cloud of passing dislike.

  It is a proof of Lowell’s excellence of judgment and of his independence of attitude, that the opinions he expressed about the leading American authors of that time coincide closely with that on which the best criticism is now agreed fifty years later. And the rattling lines of the poem are as readable now as when they were first written, with their scattering fire of verbal jokes, of ingenious rimes, and of personal witticisms. As the “Biglow Papers” is the firmest and the finest political satire yet written in the United States, so the “Fable for Critics” is the clearest and most truthful literary satire.

Biglow Papers, 1848–67

  He is the Hudibras of America, and woe betide the unfortunate wight at whom he pokes his fun; for, while it is sport to him, it is death to the subject of his sarcasm.

  Before I conclude them, may I ask you to give all our kindest regards to Lowell, and to express our admiration for the “Yankee Idyl.” I am afraid of using too extravagant language if I say all I think about it. Was there ever anything more stinging, more concentrated, more vigorous, more just? He had condensed into those few pages the essence of a hundred diplomatic papers and historical disquisitions and Fourth of July orations. I was dining a day or two since with his friend Lytton (Bulwer’s son, attaché here) and Julian Fane (Secretary of the embassy), both great admirers of him,—and especially of the “Biglow Papers,”—they begged me to send them the Mason and Slidell Idyl, but I wouldn’t,—I don’t think it is in English nature (although theirs is very cosmopolitan and liberal) to take such punishment and come up smiling. I would rather they got it in some other way, and then told me what they thought voluntarily. I have very pleasant relations with all the J. B.’s here.

  The “Biglow Papers” ended all question of Mr. Lowell’s originality. They are a master-work, in which his ripe genius fastened the spirit of its region and period. Their strength lies in qualities which, as here combined were no man’s save his own…. Never sprang the flower of art from a more unpromising soil; yet these are eclogues as true as those of Theocritus or Burns. Finally, they are not merely objective studies, but charged with the poet’s own passion, and bearing the marks of the scholar’s hand.

  It must be repeated, by way of emphasis, that, from the first fly-leaf to the colophon, this is the only complete and perfect piece of grotesque comedy in existence. In time, historical notes will be needed, as they are now for Hudibras. That the Yankee satire is to be enduring, there can be no doubt. Its total merits greatly outweigh those of Hudibras; it has far more humor, and more quotable lines; and it has a great advantage in its unique concomitants.

  The popular instinct which has seized upon the “Biglow Papers,” and will insist on regarding Mr. Lowell as the author of that comic masterpiece and of nothing else, is in one sense a sound one. For while it is just open to argument whether Mr. Lowell is an actual or an adopted son of the Muses, he is unquestionably a born humorist. He possesses a humour of thought which is at once broad and subtle; his humour of expression is his American birthright. The mere characterizations of the “Biglow Papers,” have perhaps been overpraised, though Birdofredum Sawin certainly appears original and typical to an outsider, whatever may be said of Parson Homer Wilbur; but the graphic power of statement, the gnomic faculty of the sententious utterance, the extraordinary fluency and facility of the versification, make the book a perpetual delight.

  Among the books so received was a shilling paper-backed copy of James Russell Lowell’s poems. It did not include the “Biglow Papers,” but it contained most of his best poems, and among others it contained “Extreme Unction.” It is only a short poem, eleven verses in all, but I think it made a deeper dint on my life than any other printed matter I ever read, before or since. A rich old man to whom the last sacraments of the Church are about to be administered repels the priest and dies in despair. It is very simple, and it seems strange that I, who was neither old, nor rich, nor at the point of death, should have been so affected by it. But the fact was so, nevertheless. I was in very ill-health at the time I read it, and was full of the enthusiasms of youth, intensified by a stimulating sense of ever-present duty derived from the Commonwealth.

  There are three books which I must needs name before I quite take leave of my readers, because they have, each in its own peculiar way, had a wholly incalculable influence upon my mind, and left upon me an impression so deep and lasting that I should find it impossible to exaggerate the effect produced. One of these books was Mr. Browning’s “Paracelsus;” another, John Stuart Mills’s book on “Liberty;” and the third, Mr. Lowell’s “Biglow Papers.” If I had the space at my disposal, I could easily show that the incongruity which may appear on the surface in bracketing these three books together is not really so great as it may seem at first sight. This only I know, that with the single exception of the Bible, there is no book in any language that during the last twenty years of my life, has been so much to me, has been so suggestive, so ever-present with me, so much quoted by me, so much “leaned upon,” as the “Biglow Papers.” Americans tell me that the book has almost “gone out.” It may be so; but if it be so, I am at a loss to think what literary masterpiece in America can ever hope for imperishable fame.

  If I might venture a prediction as to Lowell’s place among poets, it would be that his “Biglow” verses will outlive his finely-wrought and polished odes; precisely because the former is studded with such bits of homely wisdom as that which I disregard in offering the suggestion, viz.: “Don’t never prophesy,—onless ye know.”

  It was part of Mr. Lowell’s art to contrast this rude working-Christian Biglow with the older-fashioned Puritan Parson Wilbur, still wedded to his creed and his books…. Clever as was the “swaller-tailed talk” of the parson, one is conscious that it is mere workmanship, and that at best it is but humorous translation artistically done. It is the rude dialect of Hosea that is alone real and vital. For this is not the “Yankee talk” of tradition, of the story books and the stage—tricks of pronunciation, illiterate spelling, and epithet—but the revelation of the character, faith, work, and even scenery of a people, in words more or less familiar, but always in startling and novel combination and figurative phrasing.

  Our literature has no work more essentially American than “The Biglow Papers,” not only in the dialect form, but in its dramatic portraiture of the popular conscience of New England, of Lincoln’s “plain people” who have given the distinctive impulse to American civilization, and from whose virtues has largely sprung the American character.

  “The Biglow Papers” have on their side some weighty considerations. They have immense animal spirits; I doubt if you will anywhere find verse of the kind, in writing which the poet has had more fun; and animal spirits is perhaps a quality to which posterity is partial, just as it is notoriously averse to the recondite and the abstruse. Moreover, these poems have the United States behind them. The country cannot afford to neglect them.

  With pungent humor and in stanzas that had a sharp flavor of the soil, “Hosea Biglow” made fun of the attempts to rouse his fellow-citizens to military fervor. His stinging lines, which scorched themselves into the memory, were accompanied by the prose comments of “Parson Wilbur,” who represented the other side of the New England character. While the clergyman was glad to air his culture and his classics, he served admirably to set off the simple frankness of the Yankee youth. That the lyrics of Hosea should linger in the ears of those who heard them, Lowell took care to give to each a swinging rhythm and often also a catching refrain. When at last the scattered “Biglow Papers” were collected into a volume in 1848, the author, just to show that the New England dialect was serviceable for other things than satire, added to the book a Yankee idyl, “The Courtin’,” one of the most beautiful natural love episodes in all English poetry.

  Upon the humorous aspect of the “Biglow Papers” it is hardly necessary to dwell in the way of analysis or criticism. If the most casual reader does not appreciate this characteristic of Mr. Lowell’s dialect poems no amount of explanation or suggestion could bring their shrewd hits down to the level of his comprehension. Attention may, however, be called to the fact that Lowell’s humour as evinced in Hosea Biglow’s sprightly poems or Parson Wilbur’s laboriously learned introductions is always wholesome and never purposeless. Its prime object was not amusement, but the correction of social abuses and the abatement of political wrongs…. Because Mr. Lowell took such pains to make the dialect of Hosea Biglow and Birdofredum Sawin absolutely authentic, his “Biglow Papers,” are sure of immortality on purely linguistic grounds. They faithfully represent a mode of speech which is too often outrageously caricatured. And their value in this direction is enhanced by the introduction to the Second Series, in which Mr. Lowell gives us a scholarly discussion of the English language in America, and the characteristics of American humour.

  “The Biglow Papers” are probably the only American political poems of any length destined to endure. Though the events, real and imaginary, which they recount are transient, the wit, philosophy, and poetry are perennial, and will in themselves keep alive in the popular mind certain episodes that would otherwise be preserved only in the memory of the historical student.

  The Reverend Homer Wilbur is a semidramatic creation, yet much of Lowell’s own genuine learning, his mastery of Latin good and bad, his reckless wit, and his wide knowledge of men, is accredited to the dim-eyed old parson. Indeed, after the humor of the verses has become largely obscured with the details of last century politics, part of this stilted prose may yet be treasured among the essayist’s best utterances. But it would be difficult to name any canon of fairness in warfare which the young radical and man of genius observed scrupulously in this book.

Poetry

  Mr. Lowell, poetically speaking, is the child of his age, belonging to that class of poets in whom the imaginative and reflective element predominates over the passionate, and who are now occupying the highest place in the general favor…. Mr. Lowell has more of the “vision” than the “faculty divine.” He has the eye and mind of a poet, but wants the plastic touch, which “turns to shape the forms of things unknown.” His conceptions are superior to his power of execution. We are reminded, in reading his poetry, of the observation of a judicious critic in a sister art, that the picture would have been better painted if the painter had taken more pains…. Another conspicuous fault of Mr. Lowell’s poetry is the perpetual presence of the daintinesses and prettinesses of expression. His thoughts are overdressed. He abounds with those affected turns, with which the poetry of Tennyson (which we suspect our friend has studied more than is good for him) is so besprinkled. He is too liberal in the use of the poetical vocabulary.

  Is entitled, in our opinion, to at least the second or third place among the poets of America. We say this on account of the vigor of his imagination—a faculty to be first considered in all criticisms upon poetry. In this respect he surpasses, we think, any of our writers (at least any of those who have put themselves prominently forth as poets) with the exception of Longfellow, and perhaps one other. His ear for rhythm, nevertheless, is imperfect, and he is very far from possessing the artistic ability of either Longfellow, Bryant, Halleck, Sprague, or Pierpont.

  Sometimes, in hours of slumberous, melancholy musing, strange, sweet harmonies seem to pervade the air; impalpable forms, with garments trailing like shadows of summer clouds, glide above us; and wild and beautiful thoughts, ill-defined as the shapes we see, fill the mind. To echo these harmonies, to paint etherial forms, to embody in language these thoughts, would be as difficult as to bind the rainbows in the skies. Mr. Lowell is still a dreamer, and he strives in vain to make his readers partners in his dreamy, spiritual fancies. Yet he has written some true poetry, and as his later writings are his best, he may be classed among those who give promise of the highest excellence in the maturity of their power.

  We must declare it, though to the grief of some friends, and the disgust of more, is absolutely wanting in the true spirit and tone of poesy. His interest in the moral questions of the day has supplied the want of vitality in himself; his great facility at versification has enabled him to fill the ear with a copious stream of pleasant sound. But this verse is stereotyped; his thought sounds no depth, and posterity will not remember him.

  Unites, in his most effective poems, the dreamy, suggestive character of the transcendental bards with the philosophic simplicity of Wordsworth.

  Lowell seems to me the most perfect exponent in poetry, of the sense of national greatness, of any one that I know.

  It is unquestionably superior to any other American poem [“Commemoration Ode”] which can be compared with it, and it seems to me to be the finest of its kind in the language. It is better than the “Ode on the Death of the Duke of Wellington,” not because Lowell is a greater poet than Tennyson, but because it has a grander theme and was written a dozen years later, when “the last great Englishman” had been dwarfed by “the first American.”

  Mr. Lowell’s ode [“Ode on the Fourth of July”] in your last Magazine seemed to me full of fine thought; but it wanted wings. I mean it kept too much to one Level, though a high Level, for Lyric Poetry, as Ode is supposed to be: both in respect to Thought, and Metre. Even Wordsworth (least musical of men) changed his Flight to better purpose in his Ode to Immortality. Perhaps, however, Mr. Lowell’s subject did not require, or admit, such Alternations.

  No one of our poets shows a richer or wider range of thought than Mr. Lowell: no one a greater variety of expression in verse. But whatever form his Muse may select, it is the individuality of an intellect rather than that of a literary artist which she represents. The reader is never beguiled by studied graces of rhythm; but, on the other hand, he is constantly refreshed and stimulated by sudden glimpses of heights and splendors of thought which seem to be revealed as much to the poet as to himself. Lowell rises with a swift wing, and can upbear himself, when he pleases, on a steady one; but his nature seems hostile to that quality which compels each conception to shape itself into clear symmetry, and which therefore limits the willful exercise of the imagination. He seems to write under a strong stress of natural inspiration, then to shrink from the cooler-blooded labor of revision and the adjustment of the rhythmical expression of the informing thought. Hence he is frequently unequal, not alone in separate poems, but also in different portions of the same poem. This is much more evident, however, in his earlier than in his later verse. Such poems as “In the Twilight,” “The Washers of the Shroud,” “To the Muse,” and the greater part of “Commemoration Ode” are alike perfect and noble.

  Mirrored in the pages of James Russell Lowell, as the forests and headlands are mirrored in some far-stretching lake, are the deepest and strongest thoughts and emotions of the Transatlantic mind. Yet his name is, in the minds of many Englishmen, associated chiefly with one form of literary effort, and that not the highest, though in its way unsurpassed…. At the opening of his career a comparison was instituted between Mr. Lowell and his fellow-poet Whittier. But while both can touch a high note in the martial strains of freedom, and both possess descriptive power of no common order, here, it seems to us, the comparison ends. Lowell is an energetic genius, Whittier a contemplative; not that the former is devoid of the other’s noble contemplative moods, but he is at his best as the poet of action. Even when dealing with pacific subjects there is an air of pugnacity about him. He is in the realm of poetry what Mr. Bright is in that of politics. For men of peace, both are the hardest hitters of all the public men of our time. Given the same conditions, and Mr. Lowell might have been the Bright of the American Senate.

  We have in the new volume, “Heartsease and Rue,” all the virtues lying behind the prose—the sure touch of the critic; the shrewd cast of judgment which holds state affairs to the tests of conscience; satire, less in quantity, but equal in quality to his best; and wit flashing through satire, giving to it a kindlier glow.

  Few indeed are poets of nature or the heart who can make obvious the ideal and universal. Lowell attempts to give us too much; the forty long stanzas of “An Indian Summer Reverie,” full of apt illusions, we gladly exchange for the well-known June-lines of “The Vision of Sir Launfal.” Seldom indeed can a singer succeed by the very opulence of suggestiveness, as in Shelley’s “Cloud,” which is itself dangerously near such repetition or confusion as one notes in Lowell’s “To a Pine-Tree,” which just escapes grandeur, but escapes it utterly. Few readers know what deep and rich philosophy, what fruits of thought and culture, are to be found in some of Lowell’s work; for instance, in “Columbus,” “Beaver Brook,” “On a Portrait of Dante by Giotto,” “Stanzas on Freedom,” “The Ghost-Seer,” “Prometheus,” and a dozen others as good.

  I do not forget Shelley or Keats or Tennyson; I greatly admire parts of Browning (though heartily sympathizing with Mr. Andrew Lang’s clever skit on “Esoteric Browningism,” which I wish he had extended to take in the Wordsworth cult); but on the whole I think that of all the poets of the Nineteenth Century we could least afford to lose Lowell. Perhaps, however, I am somewhat influenced by my feelings as an American; for exactly as Burns is distinctly Scotch, so Lowell at his best, the Lowell of the “Biglow Papers” and the “Commemoration Ode,” is essentially and characteristically a national and American poet.

  It is no disparagement to so fine a poet as Mr. Lowell to remark that he has not published any exceptionally fine sonnet, though several that are much above the average level. The form does not suit him; and even at his best therein he rides his Pegasus somewhat cumbrously.

  In this, as in his life, he is versatile. He has sung on one clear harp to many tones. One cannot help thinking, sometimes, that the note had been clearer and sweeter if the tones had been fewer. For a large part of his verse strikes one not so much as the spontaneous burst of music that forces from the full-charged throat of the artist, as the dexterous imitative work of the clever artisan. The writing of most youthful poets is an echo, but much of Lowell’s is not an echo, but the conscious, skillful fabrication of poetical commodities made to order in various styles…. The poet of “The Vision of Sir Launfal” struck a chord which is quivering round the world still. For if Lowell had some of the Yankee hard self-confidence, and his belief in material progress, he had not a little of the Yankee idealism.

  Almost the greatest and finest realist who ever wrought in verse.

  In his verse there was much poetry, though it was often in the rough. He was sometimes careless. He was sometimes so clever as to seem forced, and he was sometimes forced without being at all clever.

  I took back with me to New York a complete collection of Lowell’s verse of which I had hitherto only seen portions, and studied it carefully. As I had always learned to read chronologically, I began with “A Year’s Life” (1841), continued with “A Legend of Brittany” (1844), followed with “The Vision of Sir Launfal” (1848), and ended with “A Fable for so Critics” (1848), and was thus able to trace the changes of his mind and work. I found in his first book a different theory than obtained among us, then, a more poetical theory, for if “Threnodia,” “The Sirens,” “The Beggar,” and “Allegra,” were not poems, they were nothing. I found in these poems, particularly in the first two, a lyrical quality which was as new in our verse as it was admirable; they sang themselves into life in jubilant melodies of their own making. I found another quality which was not so admirable, and which I wondered at in so poetical a poet,—the didactic quality. I could not understand why Lowell had cared to write “The Fatherland,” “The Heritage,” and the sonnets “On Reading Wordsworth’s Sonnets in Defense of Capital Punishment,” which were certainly not poems.

  While Lowell is undoubtedly the greatest literary critic that America has thus far produced, it is as a poet that he has done his most permanent work. The best of his poems represent without question the highest and most sustained flights of the American Muse. Emerson alone among our poets is to be compared with him; and yet while Emerson occasionally touched the heights, it was but to fall ingloriously. The sustained excellence of “The Vision of Sir Launfal” and “The Commemoration Ode” is hard indeed to be equalled among the poets of the Victorian era.

  It is as a poet pre-eminently that we love and admire him. Perhaps to no other American is the name of poet more truly applicable…. Although a poet of Nature, he is still more the poet of Man; the weak and the oppressed found in him a courageous and impassioned spokesman; he feared no censure or scorn that his allegiance to the slave might bring him; he longed only to break his chains, and to help bring the happy day when each man should look upon his neighbor, whether of high or low degree, as his brother. He is even more deeply the poet of Love. His poems which have love for their theme are less numerous than the others, but they are quite as profound, and reach even more nearly to the core of the man’s heart. It was through this love, which so influenced and held his life, that he became the champion of the weak and downtrodden.

  Lowell’s best poetic utterance is generally felt to mark our highest achievement in verse hitherto; but his poems are uneven, in the artistic sense often unfinished. Some of them, indeed, were prematurely printed before the vein of thought had worked itself out. It is not incredible, then, that the call of patriotism has indeed deprived us of our rarest poet’s unuttered master-song.

  The defects of Mr. Lowell’s style need not concern us much. They consist chiefly, it may be assumed, in some cacophonious lines, which a slight revision would have remedied, occasionally confused metaphors, a self-confessed tendency to sermonize, and, more particularly in his prose, certain errors of taste, slovenly expressions, and carelessly formed sentences. These may be left to those critics who judge chiefly by faults. As our acknowledged foremost man of letters, he has raised the standard of Americanism, has advocated a loftier and more rational patriotism, has made political chicanery contemptible and ridiculous, and in his own career has shown that high intellectual attainments are not inconsistent with a lively interest in current political affairs…. If not absolutely great as an original or imaginative writer, he has honestly earned the distinction of being the greatest satiric poet in the English language since the days of Pope.

  The fact would seem to be that Lowell’s anti-slavery zeal, inspired by Maria White, not only saved him from going hopelessly wrong on the main question of his time, but made the poet in him more than he would otherwise have been; the operation in this case being partly matched in Whittier’s. It is not only that the “Biglow Papers” were the best product of the younger, as the second series of them and the Commemoration Ode of the older man, but that they stirred a nature, not readily self-stirred, to an activity which did not stop with the immediate end.

  As a racy humorist and a brilliant wit using verse as an instrument of expression, he has no clear superior, probably no equal, so far at least as American readers are concerned, among writers who have employed the English language. As a satirist he has superiors, but scarcely as an inventor of jeux d’esprit, even if “The Unhappy Lot of Mr. Knott” stands as a still more unhappy example of the kind of noose into which such an inventor occasionally gets his neck. As a patriotic lyrist he has few equals and very few superiors in what is probably the highest function of such a poet—that of stimulating to a noble height the national instincts of his countrymen. But viewed in the light of cosmopolitanism, such lyrics are not supreme in their inspiration, and viewed in the light of technical criticism Lowell’s odes are far from faultless. The rest of his poetry may fairly be said to gain on that of any of his American contemporaries save Poe, in more sensuous rhythm, in choicer diction, in a more refined and subtilized imagination, and in a deeper, a more brooding intelligence. But for some readers it lacks spontaneous passion from first to last, and in spite of many really admirable poems, some of which have been already named, it scarcely gives any form of æsthetic or mental satisfaction that cannot be gained in larger measure from the work of some contemporary British poet. If this be true it is idle to expect Englishmen to value Lowell’s work in the higher spheres of poetry to the same extent that they do the fresher, more original poetry of Poe and Whitman.

Letters

  All the drawbacks to Mr. Lowell’s prose style, so laboriously dwelt upon by such critics as Wilkinson and Kirk, may be found in these letters; the long sentences, the mixed metaphors, the occasional bad taste, the sparkle of trivial puns, are here also. He who could write of Milton, in a printed essay, “A true Attic bee, he made boot on every lip,” and who would assert that no poet ever got much poetry out of a cataract except “Milton, and that was a cataract in his eye,” would not be more guarded in his offhand letters; and what most proves him unconscious of these qualities is that he is sometimes most rollicking and nonsensical to some of the most dignified of his feminine correspondents. Indeed, that side of Lowell’s nature, the pure bubble and ecstasy, the champagne quality, has never been so thoroughly exhibited as here; and the saying attributed to one of his Cambridge intimates, that “Lowell was always one bottle of champagne ahead of us all,” is abundantly exemplified, in the figurative sense in which it was intended. His animal spirits were always too exuberant to make much demand upon any artificial exhilaration although the temporary impulse under which he followed his wife into the total-abstinence movements appears soon to have passed away. But it is a curious fact that, with all this insuperable vivacity there was for many years a certain cumbrousness in his written sentences, traceable, perhaps, to the old English writers whom he loved.

  There are those who do not rank Lowell high among the poets. There are those who do not think his prose is good. But the most captious of these will hardly question that as a letter-writer he is entirely satisfactory. We have here none of those essays or sermons which are often put off as letters on the reading world. Such are the letters of Goethe and Schiller to each other. They are magnificent, but they are not—letters. Emerson’s letters to Carlyle had often five or six preliminary drafts. Carlyle’s to Emerson had never one; and Lowell’s, like Carlyle’s, are profuse strains of unpremeditated artlessness…. He is more the poet in their literary form than he is anything else, and he is more the poet in the desires and aspirations they express than he is humorist, or scholar, or critic, or statesman, or reformer.

  Mr. Lowell’s letters are not free from faults, but their faults spring from his conditions and temperament and not from proximity to a large and admiring audience. The letters are simple, frank, and often charmingly affectionate; they reveal the heart of the man, and perhaps their best service to us is the impression they convey that the man and his work were of a piece, and that the fine idealism of the poet was but the expression of what was most real and significant to the man. The self-consciousness of the young Lowell comes out very strongly if one reads his letters in connection with those of the young Walter Scott; but it was a self-consciousness inherited with the Puritan temperament rather than developed in the individual nature.

General

  I am very glad to hear that James Lowell’s work succeeds…. The specimen of the work you give—the prelude to it, if I remember right, struck me as very chaste and very beautiful. It had the freshness of a mind that drew from its own sources. I am tired, as well as yourself, of the endless imitations by American poets of the forms and figures, and topics of British poetry.

  In Mr. Lowell’s first volume, we thought we saw a tendency of this second-hand poetizing; a disposition to mimic the jingle of a man, who, with much genius and an exquisite ear for musical rhythm, has also a Titanian fondness for quaint and dainty expressions, affected turns, and mawkishly effeminate sentiment; and who would be the worst model, therefore, not only for a young poet to imitate, but even to read; so contagious are the vices of his manner. But the symptoms have, to a degree, passed off, or Mr. Lowell has nearly outgrown the disease with which his literary childhood was threatened, if not actually assailed. We recognize in his later productions a firmer intellect, a wider range of thought, a bolder tone of expression, and a versification greatly improved. We feel that he is now becoming master of his fine powers, and an artist in the execution of his conceptions. The character of his more elaborate productions is, in general, noble and elevated, though tinged somewhat with the vague speculations which pass current in some circles for philosophy. There is a similar vagueness in the expression of religious feeling; positive religious views, though not rejected, are kept far in the background. Many of the poems are devoted to the utterance of the sentiments of humanity; and here, though the feelings expressed are always amiable and tender, the youth and inexperience of the poet are clearly manifested. He is a dreamer, apparently, brooding over the wrongs which are endured in the present state of society, and rashly inferring that the existing institutions are bad, and should be overthrown. Such radical opinions are not perhaps directly uttered, but the general tone tends that way.

  We take leave of Mr. Lowell with remarking, that his affected and hyperbolical praises heaped on the old English dramatists are as nauseous as any ignorant exaggeration can be, bombastically protruded on us at second-hand, from an article in an old number of the “Retrospective Review,” from which most of the little he knows is taken, and in the taking, turned into most monstrous nonsense.

  He has a refined fancy and is graceful for an American critic, but the truth is, otherwise, that he knows nothing of English poetry or the next thing to nothing, and has merely had a dream of the early dramatists. The amount of his reading in that direction is an article in the Retrospective Review which contains extracts; and he re-extracts the extracts, re-quotes the quotations, and, “a pede Herculem,” from the foot infers the man, or rather from the sandal-string of the foot, infers and judges the soul of the man—it is comparative anatomy under the most speculative conditions. How a writer of his talents and pretensions could make up his mind to make up a book on such slight substratum, is a curious proof of the state of literature in America. Do you not think so? Why a lecturer on the English Dramatists for a “Young Ladies’ Academy” here in England, might take it to be necessary to have better information than he could gather from an odd volume of an old review! And then, Mr. Lowell’s naïveté in showing his authority,—as if the Elizabethan poets lay mouldering in inaccessible manuscripts somewhere below the lowest deep of Shakespeare’s grave,—is curious beyond the rest! Altogether, the fact is an epigram on the surface-literature of America.

  Called attention to many beauties not usually commented on, which showed an intimate familiarity with them. He seems, however, to us to have hazarded some very questionable assertions. The consummate art of Pope’s Cæsura, is sneered at as if it were a blemish, and called an “immitigable seesaw.” He reproaches Queen Anne’s reign for producing no better writer of English, than Swift—as if any age had produced a better. We are informed that Pope mixes water with the good old mother’s milk of our tongue, rubs it down till there is no muscular expression left, and that a straightforward speech cannot be got out of him. It seems to us there is enough that is straightforward in “The Dunciad,” and the “Prologue to the Satires,” addressed to Arbuthnot, with its pungent characterization of Addison…. The “Conversations” purporting to be on Old Poets, one would have thought, that with Mr. Lowell’s old love for them, he would have been able to keep among them. But so strong a hold upon him had his new love, Reform, taken, that he insists upon introducing her into all sorts of company.

  Containing the deliberate words [“Among My Books”] of perhaps the best of living English critics—his final judgments on many of the great names of literature; judgments which are the result of long and wide study and reading, of marvellous acuteness of sight and delicacy of sympathy; containing a poet’s opinion of our poets, a wit’s opinion of our wits; in short, the careful opinions of a man of cultivated genius concerning other men of genius who are near and dear to all of us, but to all of us partly unintelligible without an interpreter—this book of Mr. Lowell’s is one of the best gifts that for many years has come to the world of English literature…. There will not be two opinions among readers of the volume before us whether the finest piece of criticism in it is not the essay entitled “Shakespeare Once More;” and we doubt if the sincerest hater of the superlative would not be willing to admit that, on the whole, in virtue of its combined penetration and comprehensiveness, this is the best single essay that has yet been written on the poet and his works.

  If you want delightful reading get Lowell’s “My Study Windows,” and read the essays called “My Garden Acquaintance” and “Winter.”

  It is not necessary to compare Lowell with the world’s great authors; it is enough to say that his works deserve and will repay the study of the most thoughtful men. One cause that may repel the mere pleasure-loving reader is that the poet is more concerned for the full expression of his vigorous thought than for the melody of the resulting lines; and when the strong words of our language are borne on a torrent of feeling, they are sometimes like an ice-pack on one of our rivers at the breaking up of winter.

  Not prose, however, but verse is Mr. Lowell’s true literary vernacular. He writes, as Milton wrote, with his left hand, in writing prose. But whether in prose or in verse, it is still almost solely by genius and acquirement quite apart from the long labor of art, and of course, therefore, apart from the exercised strength and skill of that discipline to art, which is the wages of long labor alone, that he produces his final results. He thus chooses his place in the Valhalla of letters among the many “inheritors of unfulfilled renown.” It seems likely at least (but he is yet in his just mellowing prime, and Apollo avert the omen!) that his name is destined to be treasured in the history of American literature chiefly as a gracious tradition of personal character universally dear, of culture only second to the genius which it adorned, of fame constantly greater than the achievements to which it appealed.

  With just a little less Ambition of fine, or smart writing, Lowell might almost do for many Books what Ste. Beuve has left undone. He has more Humour: but not nearly so much Delicacy of Perception, or Refinement of Style; in which Ste. Beuve seems to me at the head of all Critics. I should like to give him to you if you have him not.

  Lowell’s scrutiny is sure, and his tests are apt and instant. He is a detective to be dreaded by pretenders. He wastes no reverence upon traditional errors, but no man is more impatient of sham-reform, less afraid of odia, whether theological, scientific, or æsthetic. As a comparative critic, there are few so well served by memory and reading.

  In Mr. Lowell’s mind, the Conservative and Radical elements are mixed in truly statesmanlike proportions. Capable of that concentrated passion which did much towards sweeping slavery from his own land, and with a certain bitterness and scepticism towards established forms of religion, no one can fail to be reassured and won by the essential sobriety of his qualifying utterances.

  Lowell’s address at Birmingham [“Democracy”] is full of good things, and the Times is loud in its praise. But here again I feel the want of body and current in the discourse as a whole, and am not satisfied with a host of shrewd and well-wrought and even brilliant sayings.

  Men like Lowell the country can spare but for a season for a foreign field of labor; here, in our own great land, higher and nobler duties affecting the character of the nation crowd upon them with the surest promises of gladdening returns. If the great republic is bound, as Emerson taught, to exhibit in its life the beautiful as well as the true and the just, our ablest critic must strengthen the artist in resisting the tendency to substitute costly and often useless and trivial details for the grandeur of simplicity.

  It is a good sign for American literature that Lowell is warmly appreciated by all educated men and women of the country. The wonder is that he is not one of our most popular authors. He is in perfect sympathy with all shrewd and sensible people, whatever may be the degrees of their culture; and certainly none of the American writers of novels for the newspapers which circulate hundreds of thousands of copies weekly can compare with him in his appreciation of “the popular mind” and his command of the raciest English. At any farmer’s fireside in the land he would be welcomed as a good “neighborly” man. Why is it that the circulation of his books is not commensurate with the extent of his literary reputation? It is hardly possible to take up a newspaper, whether published in New York or Nebraska, without finding an allusion to Lowell or a quotation from him; and to all appearance he is as popular as Whittier, or Bret Harte, or Artemus Ward, or Harriet Beecher Stowe. Still, his books are read mainly by what are called “cultivated” people. We are convinced that if the (so-called) “uncultivated” people only knew what delight they might find in Lowell’s prose and verse, they would domesticate his books at once in their homes.

  From my point of view no living American, in assuming to speak for American culture, has so thoroughly justified himself as has Mr. Lowell. While our novelists have been showing us how ill-bred and plebeian we are, and while our critics in general have been echoing Sainte-Beuve, or taking the pitch of their strain from London masters, there have been in his writings a vigor, a manliness and a patriotic independence, always pure, racy and refreshing, which have made us aware of our own value as the creators of a new civilization of which the old is not competent to judge. Wherever the most healthful and most fertilizing influence of American republicanism has gone, wherever the best essence of American aspiration has insinuated itself to liberalize human thought, or to give vigor to reforms, there have been felt the sincere force and the subtle earnestness of Mr. Lowell’s words set in the phrasing of a master of style.

  We all know Mr. Lowell’s brilliant quality as a poet, critic, scholar, and man of the world; but that in him which touches me most strongly belongs to his relations to his country—his keen and subtle yet kindly recognition of her virtues and her faults, and the sympathetic power with which in the day of her melancholy triumph, after the Civil War, he gave such noble expression to her self-devotion, sorrows, and hopes.

  His critical essays are so perfect in their literary quality that one forgets that they are or are not criticism.

  Excellence so high and so varied implies something more than versatility and cultivation. It implies a personality of remarkable originative power. For, after all, in literature it is personality that tells. Learning, culture, industry may make volumes, but they cannot make literature. The book is not immortal unless the man is in it, alive for evermore. Lowell’s writing stands this test. However varied its themes, it is still the utterance of the always same voice, refined, imaginative, yet urgent and stimulating.

  When James Russell Lowell died, on August 12th, the greatest of contemporary Americans passed away. He had no compeer since Emerson died; he has left no successor. On this side of the Atlantic there still linger veterans not unequal to him whom we have just lost. But neither on one side of the Atlantic nor on the other is there any poet left us whose verse is instinct with so much inspiration, or one who has in him so much of the seer of these latter days.

  When we ask ourselves what we have lost in Mr. Lowell—or rather, in happier and truer phrase, what we have gained permanently in spite of our present loss—we seem to answer, No one special book, whether of prose or verse; but an influence working sturdily and persistently in the direction of all that is most pure, most elevated, and most enthusiastic in the literary life. Few men have devoted their career to books with so little loss of manhood and citizenship as he. His tastes were distinguished; but they were wholesome and reasonable. He loved literature with passion; but he loved it wisely. As a poet, as an essayist, as a humorist, as a lecturer, as a critic, he was always in favor of what was sane. He was preserved from littleness and exaggeration by that saving grace of humor. He could even let himself go on an intellectual impulse, and swing back into perfect reasonableness on a quip or a fantastic phrase. He combined, and to a very rare degree, the broad view of the scholar-gentleman—which in less accomplished hands is thin—with the exactitude of the specialist—which in pedantic treatment is sterile and narrow. He despised the bitterness of the mere literary expert; and perhaps it will be found that his worst mistakes as a critic have been made when he hastily mistook the man of science for a dryasdust, and persuaded himself to smite him. Among Mr. Lowell’s essays none is more unlucky than that on Chaucer when it attempts to crush the genuine learning of Prof. Skeat, none more charming when it illuminates the warm genius of the poet by the light of a nature almost as sweet and as serene as his. In some respects the most academic man-of-letters whom America has produced, and recognized in that capacity by the universities of Europe, Mr. Lowell represented the older forms of learning, and was a little apt to look with contempt on the modern passion for an extreme subdivision of knowledge. He loved truth for its own sake, but he desired that it should have undergone preservation in “Fame’s great antiseptic—style,” before it was presented to him.

  He holds so many rare elements in combination,—manhood, and patriotism, and spiritual insight underlying his love of nature, his wit, his tenderness, his subtle and passionate power of expression, his fine perception of the picturesque, and his exquisite rhythmic sense and facility. Both as a man of letters and as a poet, he is one of the few whom our American youth must always look up to and study with pride and reverence—an acknowledged standard American author.

  He had so much wit that some critics have denied him imagination, but “Sir Launfal” is a work of imagination of a high order. He was the most thoughtful of our poets, the most scholarly of our critics, as learned as he was racy. No writer is more truly American and of the very soil, and no American writer had a larger appreciation of the life and literature of other nations. In the “Fable for Critics” he wrote one of our very best satires; in “The Unhappy Lot of Mr. Knott” he produced verbal play worthy of Hood; in the “Biglow Papers” there is no end of wit, humor, and biting satire, imagination and poetic feeling, racy rustic speech, combined with refinement and scholarship.

  In him, as in so many other men, great and small, there was a certain dualism of nature and character. He, too, was of those who carry two heads under their hats, two men’s hearts behind their waistcoats. Looking at him in the maturity of his years and experience those who knew him best recognised these diverse, but not warring, elements. He “beat his music out,” from the clash and contact of the two influences. He was at once a Yankee and an European; a provincial and a cosmopolitan; a preacher and a poet; a vehement and even violent partisan and a critic of wide culture and large humanity; a citizen of Massachusetts and a citizen of the world. As Lowell grew older it was the wider element that waxed, the narrower and more limited that waned. But it was the latter that was the stronger and more characteristic during the years of his greatest activity and that inspired the larger part of the work by which he is likely to be permanently remembered. Literature will know him longest, not as the critic, or as the writer of elegies and lyrics and “odes,” but as the poet who gave literary form and value to the indigenous humour, rhetoric, and satire of the farmers of New England.

  The fullness of this expression of a many-sided career is remarkable; but even more striking is the harmony of all these phases of life, one with another. There is no dividing line which sets off one part of his activity from its neighbor part; in his poetry there is politics, in his learning there is the vivifying touch of humor, in his reflection there is emotion, in the levels of his most familiar prose there is, at inconstant intervals, the sudden lift of a noble thought; and hence his works are at once too diverse and too similar—diverse in their matter and similar in the personality through which they are given out—to be easily summed or described by the methods of criticism. If there is a clue that may be used, it is to be sought in his individuality, in the fact that his ten talents have somehow been melted and fused into one, and that the greatest—the talent of being a man first and everything else afterwards.

  He might have been greater, had he been in some respects less. He might have done more, had he not known so much. He would have attained to a more powerful originality, if it had not been a part of his training to be familiar with, and to be pervaded by, the best thoughts of many minds in many ages. His greatness in a single form of excellence would have been more unchallenged and permanent, but for his many claims to admiration.

  Even so admirable, so sensible a writer as Mr. Lowell is apt to worry us with his Elizabethan profusion of imagery, epithet, and wit. “Something too much of this,” we cry out before we are half-way through.

  Cultured America, we believe, has not yet fully made up her mind as to who is her best poet; but we imagine that she could have little hesitation in pointing to Mr. Lowell as her most brilliant “all-round” literary representative. Emerson’s mission, on his visits to these shores, was philosophical rather than literary; Hawthorne’s was mainly a mission of silence; and Dr. Holmes’s, from all we could ever hear, a mission of dining. It is pre-eminently Mr. Lowell who comes to us as his Excellency the Ambassador of American literature to the court of Shakespeare…. Mr. Lowell’s forte is profusion, and his foible prodigality. His good things lie about in all directions, so temptingly, so portably, like the diamonds in Sindbad’s valley, that a reviewer, in his hurry to fill his pockets and retire on the proceeds to Balsora, is apt to forget the larger aspects of that earth and sky which encompass him. But it is a teeming earth, and a bracing sky. In his directness of speech and broad heartiness of manner, Mr. Lowell brings with him an air which, to use one of his own expressions, “blows the mind clear.” It is delightfully fresh and tonic, with a certain saline shrewdness in it, reminding us that it has come across the ocean.

  When we come to read Lowell’s noble essay on Dante we are tempted to acknowledge in his paragraphs a certain colossal unity; at a little distance from the charm of the style we dare to speak of that unity as prolix; later, we begin to wonder whether there is any unity at all in a paragraph of, say, 2183 words. It is hard to make out Lowell’s theory of the paragraph. Apparently he had a most elastic idea of the elasticity of that unit, and felt that if he looked to a proper alternation of emphasis by sentence-variation and kept up a general flow of coherence, his paragraphic duty was done. At any rate, it is easy to praise his emphasis, varied by 23 per cent. of simple sentences and by skilful inversions that put the main idea first. And we may praise his coherence, depending as it does upon closeness of logical relation, and eschewing formal connectives.

  Mr. Lowell’s literary essays represent the highest order of criticism that has appeared in America. The two volumes of “Among My Books” and the collection called “My Study Windows” contain strong and original thought, unusual scholarship, and a poet’s own power of feeling for poetry. Mr. Lowell was learned, and his learning did not dull him æsthetically, or blur his tact in distinguishing relative literary values. In criticism, as in his whole broad nature, he grew better as he grew old.

  Among men of letters Lowell is doubtless most typically American, though Curtis must find an eligible place in the list. Lowell was self-conscious, though the truest greatness is not; he was a trifle too “smart,” besides, and there is no “smartness” in great literature. But both the self-consciousness and the smartness must be admitted to be American; and Lowell was so versatile, so urbane, of so large a spirit, and so admirable in the scope of his sympathies, that he must certainly go on the calendar.

  Criticism which is the result of sympathetic relationship and consequent insight may serve to induce in a reader the right attitude toward a poet—the attitude demanded for the best response to him. Of such criticism James Russell Lowell’s essay on Chaucer, contained in his “My Study Windows,” affords a signal example. Every student of Chaucer should give a careful reading, should give several careful readings, to this essay.

  James Russell Lowell wears the title of a man of letters. He was a master of verse and a political disputant; he was to some extent a journalist, and in a high degree an orator; he administered learning in a great university; he was concerned, in his later years, with public affairs, and represented in two foreign countries the interests of the United States. Yet there is only one term to which, in an appreciation, we can without a sense of injustice give precedence over the others. He was the American of his time most saturated with literature and most directed to criticism; the American also whose character and endowment were such as to give this saturation and this direction—this intellectual experience, in short—most value. He added to the love of learning the love of expression; and his attachment to these things—to poetry, to history, to language, form, and style—was such as to make him, the greater part of his life, more than anything a man of study: but his temperament was proof against the dryness of the air of knowledge, and he remained to the end the least pale, the least passionless of scholars.

  Lowell is less remembered as a scholar than as an essayist, a poet, a critic, or, as what we may call for want of a better name, a man of letters. So far as concerns those best qualified to remember (namely, other scholars), he is as a scholar best remembered for the spirit, the impulse, the encouragement, which he gave scholarship rather than for any particular work. You will find little reference to learned works of his on Shakespeare or Chaucer. In fact, he wrote no learned works…. Lowell’s scholarship was not the scholarship of to-day. He had but a dim conception of language as it exists at the universities to-day; or of literature, either, I had almost added. His ideas on language were, on the whole, such as he gained by reading the literature of any language in question for the moment. Further he had no especial care to go, so far as I can find out. As for the linguistic studies of his contemporary, Whitney, I presume that he regarded them as having especial connection with Sanskrit or Zend…. Before Lowell’s death he had been felt generally and rightly to be the representative American man of letters of his day. As such he is still regarded, and in all probability time will never take from him the distinction of having been the successor in this respect of Washington Irving. Other reputations may change, but this one is likely to endure; for it is rather historical than critical. It is more a matter of fact than a question of taste.

  His death took from us a man rich beyond all other Americans in poetic impulses, in width of training, in varied experience, and in readiness of wit; sometimes entangled and hampered by his own wealth; unequal in expression, yet rising on the greatest occasions to the highest art; blossoming early, yet maturing late; with a certain indolence of temperament, yet accomplishing all the results of strenuous labors; not always judicial in criticism, especially in early years, yet steadily expanding and deepening; retaining in age the hopes and sympathies of his youth; and dying, with singular good fortune, just after he had gathered into final shape the literary harvest of his life.

  It is as the poet of the American ideas, so nobly expressed in these early writings, and even more nobly in some of the later ones, that we cherish the memory of Lowell, and turn to him, rather than to any other, for cheer and consolation in such a time as our own, when the Idea upon which he had fixed his faith seems to have become submerged beneath a flood of corruption, self-seeking ambition, and the cynical disregard of our national obligations. It may be urged that the American Idea, as Lowell voiced it, was nothing more than the New England Idea, or the Puritan Idea, but we are of those who believe that the best expression thus far given to Americanism in its finer sense is the expression given it by the group of New England writers who for many years held the national conscience so largely in their keeping, and of whom Lowell was at once the raciest and the most deeply imbued with those moral principles which are the only real basis of our national greatness. And it is because in these dark recent days those principles seem to have lost their old-time hold upon our national life that we listen more yearningly than ever for some echo of the voice that thrilled with indignation in “The Biglow Papers” and with the pride of American manhood in the great ode consecrated to the sacred memory of Abraham Lincoln.

  How much of the allurement of the essay style did Lowell keep, however scholarlike his quest, in papers literary, historical, even philological! In a veritable essay-subject like “On a Certain Condescension in Foreigners,” he displays himself as of the right line of descent from Montaigne; there is in him then all that unforced, winsome, intimate, yet ever restrained revelation of self which is the essayist’s model, and despair. In the love letters of the Brownings may be found some strictures by both Robert and Elizabeth upon an early book of this great American’s which must pain the admirer of the Brownings as well as of Lowell. It displays a curious insensitiveness to just this power of the Cambridge man which made him of so much more value to the world than if he had been a scholar and nothing more. One can hardly rise from anything like a complete examination of Lowell’s prose without the regret that his fate did not lead him to cultivate more assiduously and single-eyed, this rare and precious gift for essay—a gift shared with very few fellow Americans.

  Some of the strongest, most virile criticism ever produced was that of Hazlitt; but how few read Hazlitt now! In our own century Lowell reached the highest altitudes, but I cannot believe that his critical writings will be often read far down this century. Lowell’s letters will outlive them all—those charming personal compositions, in which he put so much of learning, so much of wit and insight, so much even of life itself. In them we see a man deeply learned and widely cultured, but with all that a real, living, working man, now at his tasks, now at his play.

  There can be little question that he is the most cultured writer, the most accomplished scholar, the most expert man of letters yet produced by America. He is also in all probability the most pregnant academic speaker, and although he is not the greatest American writer upon political subjects he is one of the wisest and most uplifting…. It seems certain that there is a wearying amount of corruscation in his essays, that they often contain poetical elements that might have been more serviceable if utilized in his verse, that they are far too frequently over-long, not to say sprawling in structure. On the other hand, they are so full of that indefinable something called flavour, they are so often illuminating, so packed with surprises and felicities of thought and imagination admirably expressed, that they may answer all challenges with something of the good-humoured sense of mastery their author was wont to display throughout his life.

  If his humour was his rarest, it was his most dangerous gift; so often did it tempt him to laugh out in some holy place…. What is most subjective in his verse, its keenest notes of joy and sorrow, draws us by a yet stronger cord. Less charming than Longfellow, less homely than Whittier, less artistic than Holmes, less grave than Bryant, less vivid than Emerson, less unique than Poe, his qualities, intellectual, moral, and æsthetic, in their assemblage and co-ordination assign him to a place among American men of letters which is only a little lower than that which is Emerson’s, and his alone.