In Cambridge there are two literary shrines to which visitors are

sure to find their way soon after passing the Harvard gates, "Craigie

House," the home of Longfellow and "Elmwood," the home of

Lowell. Though their hallowed retirement has been profaned by the

encroachments of the growing city, yet in their simple dignity these

fine old colonial mansions still bespeak the noble associations of the

past, and stand as memorials of the finest products of American

culture.

Elmwood was built before the Revolution by Thomas Oliver, the

Tory governor, who signed his abdication at the invitation of a

committee of "about four thousand people" who surrounded his

house at Cambridge. The property was confiscated by the

Commonwealth and used by the American army during the war. In

1818 it was purchased by the Rev. Charles Lowell, pastor of the

West Congregational Church in Boston, and after ninety years it is

still the family home. Here was born, February 22, 1819, James

Russell Lowell, with surroundings most propitious for the nurturing

of a poet-soul. Within the stately home there was a refined family

life; the father had profited by the unusual privilege of three years'

study abroad, and his library of some four thousand volumes was

not limited to theology; the mother, whose maiden name was

Spence and who traced her Scotch ancestry back to the hero of the

ballad of Sir Patrick Spens , taught her children the good old

ballads and the romantic stories in the Fairie Queen , and it was one

of the poet's earliest delights to recount the adventures of Spenser's

heroes and heroines to his playmates.

An equally important influence upon his early youth was the out-of-

door life at Elmwood. To the love of nature his soul was early

dedicated, and no American poet has more truthfully and

beautifully interpreted the inspired teachings of nature, whispered

through the solemn tree-tops or caroled by the happy birds. The

open fields surrounding Elmwood and the farms for miles around

were his familiar playground, and furnished daily adventures for

his curious and eager mind. The mere delight of this experience

with nature, he says, "made my childhood the richest part of my life.

It seems to me as if I had never seen nature again since those old

days when the balancing of a yellow butterfly over a thistle bloom

was spiritual food and lodging for a whole forenoon." In

the Cathedral is an autobiographic passage describing in a series of

charming pictures some of those choice hours of childhood:

"One summer hour abides, what time I perched,Dappled with

noonday, under simmering leaves,And pulled the pulpy oxhearts,

while aloofAn oriole clattered and the robins shrilled,Denouncing

me an alien and a thief."

Quite like other boys Lowell was subjected to the processes of the

more formal education of books. He was first sent to a "dame

school," and then to the private school of William Wells, under

whose rigid tuition he became thoroughly grounded in the classics.

Among his schoolfellows was W.W. Story, the poet-sculptor, who

continued his life-long friend. Thomas Wentworth Higginson, who

was one of the younger boys of the school, recalls the high talk of

Story and Lowell about the Fairie Queen . At fifteen he entered

Harvard College, then aninstitution with about two hundred

students. The course of study in those days was narrow and dull, a

pretty steady diet of Greek, Latin and Mathematics, with an

occasional

dessert

of

Paley's Evidences

of

Christianity or

Butler's Analogy . Lowell was not distinguished for scholarship, but

he read omnivorously and wrote copiously, often in smooth flowing

verse, fashioned after the accepted English models of the period. He

was an editor of Harvardiana , the college magazine, and was elected

class poet in his senior year. But his habit of lounging with the poets

in the secluded alcoves of the old library, in preference to attending

recitations, finally became too scandalous for official forbearance,

and he was rusticated, "on account of constant neglect of his college

duties," as the faculty records state. He was sent to Concord, where

his exile was not without mitigating profit, as he became acquainted

with Emerson and Thoreau. Here he wrote the class poem, which he

was permitted to circulate in print at his Commencement. This

production, which now stands at the head of the list of his published

works, was curiously unprophetic of his later tendencies. It was

written in the neatly, polished couplets of the Pope type and other

imitative metres, and aimed to satirize the radical movements of the

period, especially the transcendentalists and abolitionists, with both

of whom he was soon to be in active sympathy.

Lowell's first two years out of college were troubled with rather

more than the usual doubts and questionings that attend a young

man's choice of a profession. He studied for a bachelor's degree in

law, which he obtained in two years. But the work was done

reluctantly. Law books, he says, "I am reading with as few wry faces

as I may." Though he was nominally practicing law for two years,

there is no evidence that he ever had a client, except the fictitious

one so pleasantly described in his first magazine article, entitled My

First Client . From Coke and Blackstone his mind would inevitably

slip away to hold more congenial communion with the poets. He

became intensely interested in the old English dramatists, an interest

that resulted in his first series of literary articles, The Old English

Dramatists , published in the Boston Miscellany . The favor with which

these articles were received increased, he writes, the "hope of being

able one day to support myself by my pen, and to leave a calling

which I hate, and for which I am not well fitted, to say the least."

During this struggle between law and literature an influence came

into Lowell's life that settled his purposes, directed his aspirations

and essentially determined his career. In 1839 he writes to a friend

about a "very pleasant young lady," who "knows more poetry than

any one I am acquainted with." This pleasant young lady was Maria

White, who became his wife in 1844. The loves of this young couple

constitute one of the most pleasing episodes in the history of our

literature, idyllic in its simple beauty and inspiring in its spiritual

perfectness. "Miss White was a woman of unusual loveliness," says

Mr. Norton, "and of gifts of mind and heart still more unusual,

which enabled her to enter with complete sympathy into her lover's

intellectual life and to direct his genius to its highest aims." She was

herself a poet, and a little volume of her poems published privately

after her death is an evidence of her refined intellectual gifts and

lofty spirit.

In 1841 Lowell published his first collection of poems, entitled A

Year's Life . The volume was dedicated to "Una," a veiled admission

of indebtedness for its inspiration to Miss White. Two poems

particularly, Irene and My Love , and the best in the volume, are

rapturous expressions of his new inspiration. In later years he

referred to the collection as "poor windfalls of unripe experience."

Only nine of the sixty-eight poems were preserved in subsequent

collections. In 1843, with a young friend, Robert Carter, Lowell

launched a new magazine, The Pioneer , with the high purpose, as the

prospectus stated, of giving the public "a rational substitute" for the

"namby-pamby love tales and sketches monthly poured out to them

by many of our popular magazines." These young reformers did not

know how strongly the great reading public is attached to its

literary flesh-pots, and so the Pioneer proved itself too good to live in

just three months. The result of the venture to Lowell was an

interesting lesson in editorial work and a debt of eighteen hundred

dollars. His next venture was a second volume of Poems , issued in

1844, in which the permanent lines of his poetic development

appear more clearly than in A Year's Life . The tone of the first

volume was uniformly serious, but in the second his muse's face

begins to brighten with the occasional play of wit and humor. The

volume was heartily praised by the critics and his reputation as a

new poet of convincing distinction was established. In the following

year appeared Conversations on Some of the Old Poets , a volume of

literary criticism interesting now mainly as pointing to maturer

work in this field.

It is generally stated that the influence of Maria White made Lowell

an Abolitionist, but this is only qualifiedly true. A year before he

had met her he wrote to a friend: "The Abolitionists are the only

ones with whom I sympathize of the present extant parties."

Freedom, justice, humanitarianism were fundamental to his native

idealism. Maria White's enthusiasm and devotion to the cause

served to crystallize his sentiments and to stimulate him to a

practical participation in the movement. Both wrote for the Liberty

Bell , an annual published in the interests of the anti-slavery

agitation. Immediately after their marriage they went to

Philadelphia where Lowell for a time was an editorial writer for

the Pennsylvania Freeman , an anti-slavery journal once edited by

Whittier. During the next six years he was a regular contributor to

the Anti-Slavery Standard , published in New York. In all of this prose

writing Lowell exhibited the ardent spirit of the reformer, although

he never adopted the extreme views of Garrison and others of the

ultra-radical wing of the party.

But Lowell's greatest contribution to the anti-slavery cause was

the Biglow Papers , a series of satirical poems in the Yankee dialect,

aimed at the politicians who were responsible for the Mexican War,

a war undertaken, as he believed, in the interests of the Southern

slaveholders. Hitherto the Abolitionists had been regarded with

contempt by the conservative, complacent advocates of peace and

"compromise," and to join them was essentially to lose caste in the

best society. But now a laughing prophet had arisen whose tongue

was tipped with fire. The Biglow Papers was an unexpected blow to

the slave power. Never before had humor been used directly as a

weapon in political warfare. Soon the whole country was ringing

with the homely phrases of Hosea Biglow's satiric humor, and

deriding conservatism began to change countenance. "No speech, no

plea, no appeal," says George William Curtis, "was comparable in

popular and permanent effect with this pitiless tempest of fire and

hail, in the form of wit, argument, satire, knowledge, insight,

learning, common-sense, and patriotism. It was humor of the purest

strain, but humor in deadly earnest." As an embodiment of the

elemental Yankee character and speech it is a classic of final

authority. Says Curtis, "Burns did not give to the Scotch tongue a

nobler immortality than Lowell gave to the dialect of New England."

The year 1848 was one of remarkably productive results for Lowell.

Besides the Biglow Papers and some forty magazine articles and

poems, he published a third collection of Poems , the Vision of Sir

Launfal , and the Fable for Critics . The various phases of his composite

genius were nearly all represented in these volumes. The Fable was a

good-natured satire upon his fellow authors, in which he touched

up in rollicking rhymed couplets the merits and weaknesses of each,

not omitting himself, with witty characterization and acute critical

judgment; and it is still read for its delicious humor and sterling

criticism. For example, the lines on Poe will always be quoted:

"There comes Poe, with his raven, like Barnaby Rudge,

Three-fifths of him genius and two-fifths sheer fudge."

And so the sketch of Hawthorne:

"There is Hawthorne, with genius so shrinking and rareThat you

hardly at first see the strength that is there;A frame so robust, with a

nature so sweet,So earnest, so graceful, so lithe and so fleet,Is worth

a descent from Olympus to meet."

Lowell was now living in happy content at Elmwood. His father,

whom he once speaks of as a "Dr. Primrose in the comparative

degree," had lost a large portion of his property, and literary

journals in those days sent very small checks to young authors. So

humble frugality was an attendant upon the high thinking of the

poet couple, but this did not matter, since the richest objects of their

ideal world could be had without price. But clouds suddenly

gathered over their beautiful lives. Four children were born, three of

whom died in infancy. Lowell's deep and lasting grief for his first-

born is tenderly recorded in the poems She Came and Went and

the First Snow-Fall . The volume of poems published in 1848 was

"reverently dedicated" to the memory of "our little Blanche," and in

the introductory poem addressed "To M.W.L." he poured forth his

sorrow like a libation of tears:

"I thought our love at fall, but I did err;

Joy's wreath drooped o'er mine eyes: I could not see

That sorrow in our happy world must be

Love's deepest spokesman and interpreter."

The year 1-2 was spent abroad for the benefit of Mrs. Lowell's

health, which was now precarious. At Rome their little son Walter

died, and one year after their return to Elmwood sorrow's crown of

sorrow came to the poet in the death of Mrs. Lowell, October, 3. For

years after the dear old home was to him The Dead House , as he

wrote of it:

"For it died that autumn morningWhen she, its soul, was borneTo lie

all dark on the hillsideThat looks over woodland and corn."

Before 4 Lowell's literary success had been won mainly in verse.

With the appearance in the magazines of A Moosehead

Journal , Fireside Travels , and Leaves from My Italian Journal his success

as a prose essayist began. Henceforth, and against his will, his prose

was a stronger literary force than his poetry. He now gave a course

of lectures on the English poets at the Lowell Institute, and during

the progress of these lectures he received notice of his appointment

to succeed Longfellow in the professorship of the French and

Spanish languages and Belles-Lettres in Harvard College. A year

was spent in Europe in preparation for his new work, and during

the next twenty years he faithfully performed the duties of the

professorship, pouring forth the ripening fruits of his varied studies

in lectures such as it is not often the privilege of college students to

hear. That pulling in the yoke of this steady occupation was

sometimes galling is shown in his private letters. To W.D. Howells

he wrote regretfully of the time and energy given to teaching, and of

his conviction that he would have been a better poet if he "had not

estranged the muse by donning a professor's gown." But a good

teacher always bears in his left hand the lamp of sacrifice.

In 7 Lowell was married to Miss Frances Dunlap, "a woman of

remarkable gifts and grace of person and character," says Charles

Eliot Norton. In the same year the Atlantic Monthly was launched

and Lowell became its first editor. This position he held four years.

Under his painstaking and wise management the magazine quickly

became what it has continued to be, the finest representative of true

literature among periodicals. In 1864 he joined his friend, Professor

Norton, in the editorship of the North American Review , to which he

gave much of the distinction for which this periodical was once so

worthily famous. In this first appeared his masterly essays on the

great poets, Chaucer, Dante, Shakespeare, Spenser, Milton, Dryden,

and the others, which were gathered into the three volumes, Among

My Books , first and second series, and My Study Windows . Variety

was given to this critical writing by such charming essays as A Good

Word for Winter and the deliciously caustic paper On a Certain

Condescension in Foreigners .

One of the strongest elements of Lowell's character was patriotism.

His love of country and his native soil was not merely a principle, it

was a passion. No American author has done so much to enlarge

and exalt the ideals of democracy. An intense interest in the welfare

of the nation broadened the scope of his literary work and led him

at times into active public life. During the Civil War he published a

second series of Biglow Papers , in which, says Mr. Greenslet, "we feel

the vital stirring of the mind of Lowell as it was moved by the great

war; and if they never had quite the popular reverberation of the

first series, they made deeper impression, and are a more priceless

possession of our literature." When peace was declared in April, 1,

he wrote to Professor Norton: "The news, my dear Charles, is from

Heaven. I felt a strange and tender exaltation. I wanted to laugh and

I wanted to cry, and ended by holding my peace and feeling

devoutly thankful. There is something magnificent in having a

country to love." On July 21 a solemn service was held at Harvard

College in memory of her sons who had died in the war, in which

Lowell gave the Commemoration Ode , a poem which is now

regarded, not as popular, but as marking the highest reach of his

poetic power. The famous passage characterizing Lincoln is

unquestionably the finest tribute ever paid to Lincoln by an

American author.

In the presidential campaign of 1876 Lowell was active, making

speeches, serving as delegate to the Republican Convention, and

later as Presidential Elector. There was even much talk of sending

him to Congress. Through the friendly offices of Mr. Howells, who

was in intimate personal relations with President Hayes, he was

appointed Minister to Spain. This honor was the more gratifying to

him because he had long been devoted to the Spanish literature and

language, and he could now read his beloved Calderon with new

joys. In 1 he was promoted to the English mission, and during the

next four years represented his country at the Court of St. James in a

manner that raised him to the highest point of honor and esteem in

both nations. His career in England was an extraordinary, in most

respects an unparalleled success. He was our first official

representative to win completely the heart of the English people,

and a great part of his permanent achievement was to establish

more cordial relations between the two countries. His literary

reputation had prepared the ground for his personal popularity. He

was greeted as "His Excellency the Ambassador of American

Literature to the Court of Shakespeare." His fascinating personality

won friends in every circle of society. Queen Victoria declared that

during her long reign no ambassador had created so much interest

or won so much regard. He had already been honored by degrees

from Oxford and Cambridge, and now many similar honors were

thrust upon him. He was acknowledged to be the best after-dinner

speaker in England, and no one was called upon so often for

addresses at dedications, the unveiling of tablets, and other civic

occasions. It is not strange that he became attached to England with

an increasing affection, but there was no diminution of his intense

Americanism. His celebrated Birmingham address on Democracy is

yet our clearest and noblest exposition of American political

principles and ideals.

With the inauguration of Cleveland in 1 Lowell's official residence

in England came to an end. He returned to America and for a time

lived with his daughter at Deerfoot Farm. Mrs. Lowell had died in

England, and he could not carry his sorrow back to Elmwood alone.

He now leisurely occupied himself with literary work, making an

occasional address upon literature or politics, which was always

distinguished by grace and dignity of style and richness of thought.

In November, 1886, he delivered the oration at the th anniversary of

the founding of Harvard University, and, rising to the requirements

of this notable occasion, he captivated his hearers, among whom

were many distinguished delegates from the great universities of

Europe as well as of America, by the power of his thought and the

felicity of his expression.

During the period of his diplomatic service he added almost nothing

to his permanent literary product. In 1869 he had published Under

the Willows , a collection that contains some of his finest poems. In

the same year The Cathedral was published, a stately poem in blank

verse, profound in thought, with many passages of great poetic

beauty. In 1888 a final collection of poems was published,

entitled Heartsease and Rue , which opened with the memorial

poem, Agassiz , an elegy that would not be too highly honored by

being bound in a golden volume with Lycidas , Adonais and Thyrsis .

Going back to his earliest literary studies, he again (1887) lectured at

the Lowell Institute on the old dramatists, Occasionally he gave a

poem to the magazines and a collection of these Last Poems was

made in 1 by Professor Norton. During these years were written

many of the charming Letters to personal friends, which rank with

the finest literary letters ever printed and must always be regarded

as an important part of his prose works.

It was a gracious boon of providence that Lowell was permitted to

spend his last years at Elmwood, with his daughter, Mrs. Burnett,

and his grandchildren. There again, as in the early days, he watched

the orioles building their nests and listened to the tricksy catbird's

call. To an English friend he writes: "I watch the moon rise behind

the same trees through which I first saw it seventy years ago and

have a strange feeling of permanence, as if I should watch it seventy

years longer." In the old library by the familiar fireplace he sat,

when the shadows were playing among his beloved books,

communing with the beautiful past. What unwritten poems of

pathos and sweetness may have ministered to his great soul we

cannot know. In 1 a fatal disease came upon him, and after long and

heroic endurance of pain he died, August 12, 1891, and under the

trees of Mt. Auburn he rests, as in life still near his great neighbor

Longfellow. In a memorial poem Oliver Wendell Holmes spoke for

the thousands who mourned:

"Peace to thy slumber in the forest shade,

Poet and patriot, every gift was thine;

Thy name shall live while summers bloom and fade

And grateful memory guard thy leafy shrine."

Lowell's rich and varied personality presents a type of cultured

manhood that is the finest product of American democracy. The

largeness of his interests and the versatility of his intellectual

powers give him a unique eminence among American authors. His

genius was undoubtedly embarrassed by the diffusive tendency of

his interests. He might have been a greater poet had he been less the

reformer and statesman, and his creative impulses were often

absorbed in the mere enjoyment of exercising his critical faculty.

Although he achieved only a qualified eminence as poet, or as prose

writer, yet because of the breadth and variety of his permanent

achievement he must be regarded as our greatest man of letters. His

sympathetic interest, always outflowing toward concrete humanity,

was a quality—

"With such large range as from the ale-house benchCan reach the

stars and be with both at home."

With marvelous versatility and equal ease he could talk with the

down-east farmer and salty seamen and exchange elegant

compliments with old world royalty. In The Cathedral he says

significantly:

"I thank benignant nature most for this,—

A force of sympathy, or call it lack

Of character firm-planted, loosing me

From the pent chamber of habitual self

To dwell enlarged in alien modes of thought,

Haply distasteful, wholesomer for that,

And through imagination to possess,

As they were mine, the lives of other men."

In the delightful little poem, The Nightingale in the Study , we have a

fanciful expression of the conflict between Lowell's love of books

and love of nature. His friend the catbird calls him "out beneath the

unmastered sky," where the buttercups "brim with wine beyond all

Lesbian juice." But there are ampler skies, he answers, "in Fancy's

land," and the singers though dead so long—

"Give its best sweetness to all song.

To nature's self her better glory."

His love of reading is manifest in all his work, giving to his style a

bookishness that is sometimes excessive and often troublesome. His

expression, though generally direct and clear, and happily colored

by personal frankness, is often burdened with learning. To be able to

read his essays with full appreciation is in itself evidence of a liberal

education. His scholarship was broad and profound, but it was not

scholarship in the German sense, exhaustive and exhausting. He

studied for the joy of knowing, never for the purpose of being

known, and he cared more to know the spirit and meaning of things

than to know their causes and origins. A language he learned for the

sake of its literature rather than its philology. As Mr. Brownell

observes, he shows little interest in the large movements of the

world's history. He seemed to prefer history as sublimated in the

poet's song. The field of belles-lettres was his native province; its

atmosphere was most congenial to his tastes. In book-land it was

always June for him—

"Springtime ne'er denied

Indoors by vernal Chaucer, whose fresh woods

Throb thick with merle and mavis all the year."

But books could never divert his soul from its early endearments

with out-of-door nature. "The older I grow," he says, "the more I am

convinced that there are no satisfactions so deep and so permanent

as our sympathies with outward nature." And in the preface to My

Study Windows he speaks of himself as "one who has always found

his most fruitful study in the open air." The most charming element

of his poetry is the nature element that everywhere cheers and

stimulates the reader. It is full of sunshine and bird music. So

genuine, spontaneous and sympathetic are his descriptions that we

feel the very heart throbs of nature in his verse, and in the prose of

such records of intimacies with outdoor friends as the essay, My

Garden Acquaintance . "How I do love the earth," he exclaims. "I feel it

thrill under my feet. I feel somehow as if it were conscious of my

love, as if something passed into my dancing blood from it." It is this

sensitive nearness to nature that makes him a better interpreter of

her "visible forms" than Bryant even; moreover, unlike Bryant he

always catches the notes of joy in nature's voices and feels the uplift

of a happy inspiration.

In the presence of the immense popularity of Mark Twain, it may

seem paradoxical to call Lowell our greatest American humorist. Yet

in the refined and artistic qualities of humorous writing and in the

genuineness of the native flavor his work is certainly superior to any

other humorous writing that is likely to compete with it for

permanent interest. Indeed, Mr. Greenslet thinks that "it is as the

author of the Biglow Papers that he is likely to be longest

remembered." The perpetual play of humor gave to his work, even

to the last, the freshness of youth. We love him for his boyish love of

pure fun. The two large volumes of his Letters are delicious reading

because he put into them "good wholesome nonsense," as he says,

"keeping my seriousness to bore myself with."

But this sparkling and overflowing humor never obscures the deep

seriousness that is the undercurrent of all his writing. A high

idealism characterizes all his work. One of his greatest services to

his country was the effort to create a saner and sounder political life.

As he himself realized, he often moralized his work too much with a

purposeful idealism. In middle life he said, "I shall never be a poet

until I get out of the pulpit, and New England was all meeting-

house when I was growing up." In religion and philosophy he was

conservative, deprecating the radical and scientific tendencies of the

age, with its knife and glass—

"That make thought physical and thrust far off

The Heaven, so neighborly with man of old,"

The moral impulse and the poetic impulse were often in conflict,

and much of his early poetry for this reason was condemned by his

later judgment. His maturer poems are filled with deep-thoughted

lines, phrases of high aspiration and soul-stirring ecstasies. Though

his thought is spiritual and ideal, it is always firmly rooted in the

experience of common humanity. All can climb the heights with him

and catch inspiring glimpses at least of the ideal and the infinite.

THE VISION OF SIR LAUNFAL

Early in 1848 in a letter to his friend Briggs, Lowell speaks of The

Vision of Sir Launfal as "a sort of story, and more likely to be

popular than what I write generally. Maria thinks very highly of it."

And in another letter he calls it "a little narrative poem." In

December, 1848, it was published in a thin volume alone, and at

once justified the poet's expectations of popularity. The poem was

an improvisation, like that of his "musing organist," for it was

written, we are told, almost at a single sitting, entirely within two

days. The theme may have been suggested by Tennyson's Sir

Galahad, but his familiarity with the old romances and his love of

the mystical and symbolic sense of these good old-time tales were a

quite ample source for such suggestion. Moreover Lowell in his

early years was much given to seeing visions and dreaming

dreams. "During that part of my life," he says, "which I lived most

alone, I was never a single night unvisited by visions, and once I

thought I had a personal revelation from God Himself." The Fairie

Queen was "the first poem I ever read," he says, and the bosky

glades of Elmwood were often transformed into an enchanted forest

where the Knight of the Red Cross, and Una and others in medieval

costume passed up and down before his wondering eyes. This

medieval romanticism was a perfectly natural accompaniment of his

intense idealism.

The Vision of Sir Launfal and the Fable for Critics, published in the

same year, illustrate the two dominant and strikingly contrasted

qualities of his nature, a contrast of opposites which he himself

clearly perceived. "I find myself very curiously compounded of two

utterly distinct characters. One half of me is clear mystic and

enthusiast, and the other, humorist," and he adds that "it would

have taken very little to have made a Saint Francis" of him. It was

the Saint Francis of New England, the moral and spiritual enthusiast

in Lowell's nature that produced the poem and gave it power. Thus

we see that notwithstanding its antique style and artificial structure,

it was a perfectly direct and spontaneous expression of himself.

The allegory of the Vision is easily interpreted, in its main

significance. There is nothing original in the lesson, the humility of

true charity, and it is a common criticism that the moral purpose of

the poem is lost sight of in the beautiful nature pictures. But a

knowledge of the events which were commanding Lowell's

attention at this time and quickening his native feelings into

purposeful utterance gives to the poem a much deeper significance.

In 1844, when the discussion over the annexation of Texas was

going on, he wrote The Present Crisis, a noble appeal to his

countrymen to improve and elevate their principles. During the next

four years he was writing editorially for the Standard, the official

organ of the Anti-Slavery Society, at the same time he was bringing

out the Biglow Papers. In all these forms of expression he voiced

constantly the sentiment of reform, which now filled his heart like a

holy zeal. The national disgrace of slavery rested heavily upon his

soul. He burned with the desire to make God's justice prevail where

man's justice had failed. In 1846 he said in a letter, "It seems as if my

heart would break in pouring out one glorious song that should be

the gospel of Reform, full of consolation and strength to the

oppressed, yet falling gently and restoringly as dew on the withered

youth-flowers of the oppressor. That way my madness lies, if any."

This passionate yearning for reform is embodied poetically in the

Vision. In a broad sense, therefore, the poem is an expression of

ideal democracy, in which equality, sympathy, and a sense of the

common brotherhood of man are the basis of all ethical actions and

standards. It is the Christ-like conception of human society that is

always so alluring in the poetry and so discouraging in the prose of

life.

The following explanation appeared in the early editions of the

poem as an introductory note:

"According to the mythology of the Romancers, the San Greal, or

Holy Grail, was the cup out of which Jesus Christ partook of the last

supper with his disciples. It was brought into England by Joseph of

Arimathea, and remained there, an object of pilgrimage and

adoration, for many years in the keeping of his lineal descendants. It

was incumbent upon those who had charge of it to be chaste in

thought, word, and deed; but, one of the keepers having broken this

condition, the Holy Grail disappeared. From that time it was a

favorite enterprise of the Knights of Arthur's court to go in search of

it. Sir Galahad was at last successful in finding it, as may be read in

the seventeenth book of the Romance of King Arthur. Tennyson has

made Sir Galahad the subject of one of the most exquisite of his

poems.

"The plot (if I may give that name to anything so slight) of the

following poem is my own, and, to serve its purposes, I have

enlarged the circle of competition in search of the miraculous cup in

such a manner as to include not only other persons than the heroes

of the Round Table, but also a period of time subsequent to the date

of King Arthur's reign."

In the last sentence there is a sly suggestion of Lowell's playfulness.

Of course every one may compete in the search for the Grail, and the

"time subsequent to King Arthur's reign" includes the present time.

The Romance of King Arthur is the Morte Darthur of Sir Thomas

Malory. Lowell's specific indebtedness to the medieval romances

extended only to the use of the symbol of consecration to some

noble purpose in the search for the Grail, and to the name of his

hero. It is a free version of older French romances belonging to the

Arthurian cycle. Sir Launfal is the title of a poem written by Sir

Thomas Chestre in the reign of Henry VI, which may be found in

Ritson's Ancient English Metrical Romances. There is nothing

suggestive of Lowell's poem except the quality of generosity in the

hero, who—

"gaf gyftys largelyche,

Gold and sylver; and clodes ryche,

To squyer and to knight."

One of Lowell's earlier poems, The Search, contains the germ of The

Vision of Sir Launfal. It represents a search for Christ, first in

nature's fair woods and fields, then in the "proud world" amid

"power and wealth," and the search finally ends in "a hovel rude"

where—

"The King I sought for meekly stood:

A naked, hungry child

Clung round his gracious knee,

And a poor hunted slave looked up and smiled

To bless the smile that set him free."

And Christ, the seeker learns, is not to be found by wandering

through the world.

"His throne is with the outcast and the weak."

A similar fancy also is embodied in a little poem entitled A Parable.

Christ goes through the world to see "How the men, my brethren,

believe in me," and he finds "in church, and palace, and judgment-

hall," a disregard for the primary principles of his teaching.

"Have ye founded your throne and altars, then,

On the bodies and souls of living men?

And think ye that building shall endure,

Which shelters the noble and crushes the poor?"

These early poems and passages in others written at about the same

time, taken in connection with the Vision, show how strongly the

theme had seized upon Lowell's mind.

The structure of the poem is complicated and sometimes confusing.

At the outset the student must notice that there is a story within a

story. The action of the major story covers only a single night, and

the hero of this story is the real Sir Launfal, who in his sleep dreams

the minor story, the Vision. The action of this story covers the

lifetime of the hero, the imaginary Sir Launfal, from early manhood

to old age, and includes his wanderings in distant lands. The poem

is constructed on the principles of contrast and parallelism. By

holding to this method of structure throughout Lowell sacrificed the

important artistic element of unity, especially in breaking the

narrative with the Prelude to the second part. The first Prelude

describing the beauty and inspiring joy of spring, typifying the

buoyant youth and aspiring soul of Sir Launfal, corresponds to the

second Prelude, describing the bleakness and desolation of winter,

typifying the old age and desolated life of the hero. But beneath the

surface of this wintry age there is a new soul of summer beauty, the

warm love of suffering humanity, just as beneath the surface of the

frozen brook there is an ice-palace of summer beauty. In Part First

the gloomy castle with its joyless interior stands as the only cold and

forbidding thing in the landscape, "like an outpost of winter;" so in

Part Second the same castle with Christmas joys within is the only

bright and gladsome object in the landscape. In Part First the castle

gates never "might opened be"; in Part Second the "castle gates stand

open now." And thus the student may find various details

contrasted and paralleled. The symbolic meaning must be kept

constantly in mind, or it will escape unobserved; for example, the

cost of earthly things in comparison with the generosity of June

corresponds to the churlish castle opposed to the inviting warmth of

summer; and each symbolizes the proud, selfish, misguided heart of

Sir Launfal in youth, in comparison with the humility and large

Christian charity in old age. The student should search for these

symbolic hints, passages in which "more is meant than meets the

ear," but if he does not find all that the poet may or may not have

intended in his dreamy design, there need be no detraction from the

enjoyment of the poem.

Critical judgment upon The Vision of Sir Launfal is generally severe

in respect to its structural faults. Mr. Greenslet declares that

"through half a century, nine readers out of ten have mistaken

Lowell's meaning," even the "numerous commentators" have

"interpreted the poem as if the young knight actually adventured

the quest and returned from it at the end of years, broken and old."

This, however, must be regarded as a rather exaggerated estimate of

the lack of unity and consistency in the poem. Stedman says: "I think

that The Vision of Sir Launfal owed its success quite as much to a

presentation of nature as to its misty legend. It really is a landscape

poem, of which the lovely passage, 'And what is so rare as a day in

June?' and the wintry prelude to Part Second, are the specific

features." And the English critic, J. Churton Collins, thinks that "Sir

Launfal, except for the beautiful nature pictures, scarcely rises above

the level of an Ingoldsby Legend."

The popular judgment of the poem (which after all is the important

judgment) is fairly stated by Mr. Greenslet: "There is probably no

poem in American literature in which a visionary faculty like that

[of Lowell] is expressed with such a firm command of poetic

background and variety of music as in Sir Launfal ... its structure is

far from perfect; yet for all that it has stood the searching test of

time: it is beloved now by thousands of young American readers,

for whom it has been a first initiation to the beauty of poetic

idealism."

While studying The Vision of Sir Launfal the student should be

made familiar with Tennyson's Sir Galahad and The Holy Grail, and

the libretto of Wagner's Parsifal. Also Henry A. Abbey's magnificent

series of mural paintings in the Boston Public Library, representing

the Quest of the Holy Grail, may be utilized in the Copley Prints. If

possible the story of Sir Galahad's search for the Grail in the

seventeenth book of Sir Thomas Malory's Morte Darthur should be

read. It would be well also to read Longfellow's King Robert of

Sicily, which to some extent presents a likeness of motive and

treatment.

THE COMMEMORATION ODE

In April, 1, the Civil War was ended and peace was declared. On

July 21 Harvard College held a solemn service in commemoration of

her ninety-three sons who had been killed in the war. Eight of these

fallen young heroes were of Lowell's own kindred. Personal grief

thus added intensity to the deep passion of his utterance upon this

great occasion. He was invited to give a poem, and the ode which he

presented proved to be the supreme event of the noble service. The

scene is thus described by Francis H. Underwood, who was in the

audience:

"The services took place in the open air, in the presence of a great

assembly. Prominent among the speakers were Major-General

Meade, the hero of Gettysburg, and Major-General Devens. The

wounds of the war were still fresh and bleeding, and the interest of

the occasion was deep and thrilling. The summer afternoon was

drawing to its close when the poet began the recital of the ode. No

living audience could for the first time follow with intelligent

appreciation the delivery of such a poem. To be sure, it had its

obvious strong points and its sonorous charms; but, like all the later

poems of the author, it is full of condensed thought and requires

study. The reader to-day finds many passages whose force and

beauty escaped him during the recital, but the effect of the poem at

the time was overpowering. The face of the poet, always singularly

expressive, was on this occasion almost transfigured—glowing, as if

with an inward light. It was impossible to look away from it. Our

age has furnished many great historic scenes, but this

Commemoration combined the elements of grandeur and pathos,

and produced an impression as lasting as life."

Of the delivery and immediate effect of the poem Mr. Greenslet

says: "Some in the audience were thrilled and shaken by it, as

Lowell himself was shaken in its delivery, yet he seems to have felt

with some reason that it was not a complete and immediate success.

Nor is this cause for wonder. The passion of the poem was too ideal,

its woven harmonies too subtle to be readily communicated to so

large an audience, mastered and mellowed though it was by a single

deep mood. Nor was Lowell's elocution quite that of the deep-

mouthed odist capable of interpreting such organ tones of verse. But

no sooner was the poem published, with the matchless Lincoln

strophe inserted, than its greatness and nobility were manifest."

The circumstances connected with the writing of the ode have been

described by Lowell in his private letters. It appears that he was

reluctant to undertake the task, and for several weeks his mind

utterly refused to respond to the high duty put upon it. At last the

sublime thought came to him upon the swift wings of inspiration.

"The ode itself," he says, "was an improvisation. Two days before the

commemoration I had told my friend Child that it was impossible—

that I was dull as a door-mat. But the next day something gave me a

jog, and the whole thing came out of me with a rush. I sat up all

night writing it out clear, and took it on the morning of the day to

Child." In another letter he says: "The poem was written with a

vehement speed, which I thought I had lost in the skirts of my

professor's gown. Till within two days of the celebration I was

hopelessly dumb, and then it all came with a rush, literally making

me lean (mi fece magro), and so nervous that I was weeks in getting

over it." In a note in Scudder's biography of Lowell (Vol. II., p. ), it is

stated upon the authority of Mrs. Lowell that the poem was begun

at ten o'clock the night before the commemoration day, and finished

at four o'clock in the morning. "She opened her eyes to see him

standing haggard, actually wasted by the stress of labor and the

excitement which had carried him through a poem full of passion

and fire, of five hundred and twenty-three lines, in the space of six

hours."

Critical estimates are essentially in accord as to the deep significance

and permanent poetic worth of this poem. Greenslet, the latest

biographer of Lowell, says that the ode, "if not his most perfect, is

surely his noblest and most splendid work," and adds: "Until the

dream of human brotherhood is forgotten, the echo of its large

music will not wholly die away." Professor Beers declares it to be,

"although uneven, one of the finest occasional poems in the

language, and the most important contribution which our Civil War

has made to song." Of its exalted patriotism, George William Curtis

says: "The patriotic heart of America throbs forever in Lincoln's

Gettysburg address. But nowhere in literature is there a more

magnificent and majestic personification of a country whose name is

sacred to its children, nowhere a profounder passion of patriotic

loyalty, than in the closing lines of the Commemoration Ode. The

American whose heart, swayed by that lofty music, does not thrill

and palpitate with solemn joy and high resolve does not yet know

what it is to be an American."

With the praise of a discriminating criticism Stedman discusses the

ode in his Poets of America: "Another poet would have composed a

less unequal ode; no American could have glorified it with braver

passages, with whiter heat, with language and imagery so befitting

impassioned thought. Tried by the rule that a true poet is at his best

with the greatest theme, Lowell's strength is indisputable. The ode is

no smooth-cut verse from Pentelicus, but a mass of rugged quartz,

beautiful with prismatic crystals, and deep veined here and there

with virgin gold. The early strophes, though opening with a fine

abrupt line, 'weak-winged is song,' are scarcely firm and incisive.

Lowell had to work up to his theme. In the third division, 'Many

loved Truth, and lavished life's best oil,' he struck upon a new and

musical intonation of the tenderest thoughts. The quaver of this

melodious interlude carries the ode along, until the great strophe is

reached,—

Such was he, our Martyr-Chief,

in which the man, Abraham Lincoln, whose death had but just

closed the national tragedy, is delineated in a manner that gives this

poet a preëminence, among those who capture likeness in enduring

verse, that we award to Velasquez among those who fasten it upon

the canvas. 'One of Plutarch's men' is before us, face to face; an

historic character whom Lowell fully comprehended, and to whose

height he reached in this great strophe. Scarcely less fine is his

tearful, yet transfiguring, Avete to the sacred dead of the

Commemoration. The weaker divisions of the production furnish a

background to these passages, and at the close the poet rises with

the invocation,—

'Bow down, dear Land, for thou hast found release!'

a strain which shows that when Lowell determinedly sets his mouth

to the trumpet, the blast is that of Roncesvalles."

W.C. Brownell, the latest critic of Lowell's poetry, says of this poem:

"The ode is too long, its evolution is defective, it contains verbiage, it

preaches. But passages of it—the most famous having

characteristically been interpolated after its delivery—are equal to

anything of the kind. The temptation to quote from it is hard to

withstand. It is the cap-sheaf of Lowell's achievement." In this ode

"he reaches, if he does not throughout maintain, his own 'clear-

ethered height' and his verse has the elevation of ecstasy and the

splendor of the sublime."

The versification of this poem should be studied with some

particularity. Of the forms of lyric expression the ode is the most

elaborate and dignified. It is adapted only to lofty themes and

stately occasions. Great liberty is allowed in the choice and

arrangement of its meter, rhymes, and stanzaic forms, that its varied

form and movement may follow the changing phases of the

sentiment and passion called forth by the theme. Lowell has given

us an account of his own consideration of this matter. "My problem,"

he says, "was to contrive a measure which should not be tedious by

uniformity, which should vary with varying moods, in which the

transitions (including those of the voice) should be managed

without jar. I at first thought of mixed rhymed and blank verses of

unequal measures, like those in the choruses of Samson Agonistes,

which are in the main masterly. Of course, Milton deliberately

departed from that stricter form of Greek chorus to which it was

bound quite as much (I suspect) by the law of its musical

accompaniment as by any sense of symmetry. I wrote some stanzas

of the Commemoration Ode on this theory at first, leaving some

verses without a rhyme to match. But my ear was better pleased

when the rhyme, coming at a longer interval, as a far-off echo rather

than instant reverberation, produced the same effect almost, and yet

was gratified by unexpectedly recalling an association and faint

reminiscence of consonance."

THE POETS' TRIBUTES TO LOWELL

THE VISION OF SIR LAUNFAL

AND OTHER POEMS

THE VISION OF SIR LAUNFAL

PRELUDE TO PART FIRST

Over his keys the musing organist,

Beginning doubtfully and far away,

First lets his fingers wander as they list,

And builds a bridge from Dreamland for his lay:

Then, as the touch of his loved instrument

Gives hope and fervor, nearer draws his theme,

First guessed by faint auroral flushes sent

Along the wavering vista of his dream.

Not only around our infancy

Doth heaven with all its splendors lie;

Daily, with souls that cringe and plot,

We Sinais, climb and know it not.

Over our manhood bend the skies;

Against our fallen and traitor lives

The great winds utter prophecies;

With our faint hearts the mountain strives;

Its arms outstretched, the druid wood

Waits with its benedicite;

And to our age's drowsy blood

Still shouts the inspiring sea.

Earth gets its price for what Earth gives us;

The beggar is taxed for a corner to die in,

The priest hath his fee who comes and shrives us,

We bargain for the graves we lie in:

At the Devil's booth are all things sold,

Each ounce of dross costs its ounce of gold;

For a cap and bells our lives we pay,

Bubbles we buy with a whole soul's tasking

'T is heaven alone that is given away,

'T is only God may be had for the asking;

No price is set on the lavish summer;

June may be had by the poorest comer.

And what is so rare as a day in June?

Then, if ever, come perfect days;

Then Heaven tries the earth if it be in tune,

And over it softly her warm ear lays:

Whether we look, or whether we listen,

We hear life murmur, or see it glisten;

Every clod feels a stir of might,

An instinct within it that reaches and towers,

And, groping blindly above it for light,

Climbs to a soul in grass and flowers;

The flush of life may well be seen

Thrilling back over hills and valleys;

The cowslip startles in meadows green,

The buttercup catches the sun in its chalice,

And there's never a leaf nor a blade too mean

To be some happy creature's palace;

The little bird sits at his door in the sun,

Atilt like a blossom among the leaves,

And lets his illumined being o'errun

With the deluge of summer it receives;

His mate feels the eggs beneath her wings,

And the heart in her dumb breast flutters and sings;

He sings to the wide world, and she to her nest,—

In the nice ear of Nature which song is the best?

Now is the high-tide of the year

And whatever of life hath ebbed away

Comes flooding back, with a ripply cheer,

Into every bare inlet and creek and bay;

Now the heart is so full that a drop overfills it,

We are happy now, because God wills it;

No matter how barren the past may have been,

'T is enough for us now that the leaves are green;

We sit in the warm shade and feel right well

How the sap creeps up and the blossoms swell;

We may shut our eyes, but we cannot help knowing

That skies are clear and grass is growing:

The breeze comes whispering in our ear

That dandelions are blossoming near,

That maize has sprouted, that streams are flowing,

That the river is bluer than the sky,

That the robin is plastering his house hard by;

And if the breeze kept the good news back,

For other couriers we should not lack;

We could guess it all by yon heifer's lowing,—

And hark! how clear bold chanticleer,

Warmed with the new wine of the year,

Tells all in his lusty crowing!

Joy comes, grief goes, we know not how;

Everything is happy now,

Everything is upward striving;

'T is as easy now for the heart to be true

As for grass to be green or skies to be blue,—

'T is the natural way of living:

Who knows whither the clouds have fled?

In the unscarred heaven they leave no wake;

And the eyes forget the tears they have shed,

The heart forgets its sorrow and ache;

The soul partakes the season's youth,

And the sulphurous rifts of passion and woe

Lie deep 'neath a silence pure and smooth,

Like burnt-out craters healed with snow.

What wonder if Sir Launfal now

Remembered the keeping of his vow?