Cambridge Sketches

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In the spring of 1866 a number of Southerners came to Boston to borrow
funds in order to rehabilitate their plantations, and were introduced at
the Union League Club. Finding themselves there in a congenial element
they made speeches strongly tinged with secession doctrines. Sumner, of
course, could not let this pass without making some protest against it,
and for this he was hissed. The incident was everywhere talked of, and
came under discussion at the next meeting of the Saturday Club. Otto
Dresel, a German pianist, who had small reason for being there, said, "It
was not Mr. Sumner's politics but his bad manners that were hissed."
Longfellow set his glass down with emphasis, and replied: "If good
manners could not say it, thank heaven bad manners did;" and Lowell
supported this with some pretty severe criticism of the Union League
Club. In justice to the Union League Club, however, it ought to be said
that there was applause as well as hisses for Sumner.

Longfellow had a leonine face, but it was that of a very mild lion; one
that had never learned the use of teeth and claws. Yet those who knew him
felt that he could roar on occasion, if occasion required it. Once at
Longfellow's own table the conversation chanced upon Goethe, and a
gentleman present remarked that Goethe was in the habit of drinking three
bottles of hock a day. "Who said he did?" inquired the poet. "It is in
Lewes's biography," said the gentleman. "I do not believe it," replied
Longfellow, "unless," he added with a laugh, "they were very small
bottles." A few days afterwards Prof. William James remarked in regard to
this incident that the story was quite incredible.

In his youth Longfellow seems to have taken to guns and fishing-rods more
regularly than some boys do, but pity for his small victims soon induced
him to relinquish the sport. His eldest son, Charles, also took to guns
very naturally, and in spite of a severe wound which he received from the
explosion of a badly loaded piece, he finally became one of the most
expert pigeon-shooters in the State. At the intercession of his father,
who considered the game too cruel, he afterwards relinquished this for
target-shooting, in which he succeeded equally well. I was talking one
day with him on this subject and remarked that I had recently shot two
crows with my rifle. "What did you do it for?" interposed his father, in
a deprecatory tone. So I explained to him that crows were outside of the
pale of the law; that they not only were a pest to the farmers but
destroyed the eggs and young of singing birds,--in fact, they were bold,
black robbers, whose livery betokened their evil deeds. This evidently
interested him, and he finally said with a laugh: "If that is the case,
we will give you and Charlie a commission to exterminate them."

There was a story that when young Nicholas Longworth came to Harvard
College in the autumn of 1862 and called on Mr. Longfellow, who had been
entertained at his father's house in Cincinnati, the poet said to him:
"It is _worth_ that makes the man; the want of it the _fellow_"
--a compliment that almost dumfounded his young acquaintance. It is
certain that Longfellow addressed a poem to Mrs. Longworth which will be
found in the collection of his minor poems, and in which he speaks of her
as--

"The Queen of the West in her garden dressed,
By the banks of the beautiful river."

In the midst of this unrivalled prosperity, this distinction of genius,
and public and private honor, on the ninth of July, 1861, there came one
of the most harrowing tragedies that has ever befallen a man's domestic
life. Longfellow was widowed for the second time, and five children were
left without a mother. It seemed as if Providence had set a limit beyond
which human happiness could not pass. It was after this calamity that
Longfellow undertook his metrical translation of Dante's "Divina
Commedia," a much more difficult and laborious work than writing original
poetry. As his brother said, "He required an absorbing occupation to
prevent him from thinking of the past."

No wonder that in later years he said, in his exquisite verses on the
Mountain of the Holy Cross in Colorado, these pathetic words, "On my
heart also there is a cross of snow." In Longfellow's diary we meet with
the names of many books that he read, and these as well as the pertinent
comments on them tell much more of his intellectual life than we derive
from his letters. "Adam Bede," which took the world by storm, did not
make so much of an impression on him as Hawthorne's "Marble Faun," which
he read through in a day and calls a wonderful book. Of "Adam Bede" he
says: "It is too feminine for a man; too masculine for a woman." He says
of Dickens, after reading "Barnaby Rudge": "He is always prodigal and
ample, but what a set of vagabonds he contrives to introduce us to!"
"Barnaby Rudge" is certainly the most bohemian and esoteric of Dickens's
novels. He liked much better Miss Muloch's "John Halifax,"--a popular
book in its time, but not read very much since. He calls Charles Reade a
clever and amusing writer. We find nothing concerning Disraeli, Trollope,
or Wilkie Collins. Neither do we hear of critical and historical writers
like Ruskin, Matthew Arnold, Carlyle, and Froude. He went, however, to
call on Carlyle in England, and was greatly impressed by his
conversation. The scope of Longfellow's reading does not compare with
that of Emerson or Marian Evans; but the doctors say that "every man of
forty knows the food that is good for him," and this is true mentally as
well as physically.

He refers more frequently to Tennyson than to any other writer, and
always in a generous, cordial manner. Of the "Idyls of the King" he says
that the first and third Idyls could only have come from a great poet,
but that the second and fourth are not quite equal to the others.

Once, at his sister's house, he held out a book in his hand and said:
"Here is some of the finest dramatic poetry that I have ever read." It
was Tennyson's "Queen Mary;" but there were many who would not have
agreed with his estimate of it. Rev. Samuel Longfellow considered the
statement very doubtful.

In the summer of 1868 Longfellow went to Europe with his family to see
what Henry James calls "the best of it." Rev. Samuel Longfellow and T. G.
Appleton accompanied the party, which, with the addition of Ernest
Longfellow's beautiful bride, made a strong impression wherever they were
seen. In fact their tour was like a triumphal procession.

Longfellow was everywhere treated with the distinction of a famous poet;
and his fine appearance and dignified bearing increased the reputation
which had already preceded him. His meeting with Tennyson was considered
as important as the visit of the King of Prussia to Napoleon III., and
much less dangerous to the peace of Europe. It was talked of from
Edinburgh to Rome.

Longfellow, however, hated lionizing in all its forms, and he avoided
ceremonious receptions as much as possible. He enjoyed the entertainment
of meeting distinguished people, but he evidently preferred to meet them
in an unconventional manner, and to have them as much to himself as
possible. Princes and savants called on him, but he declined every
invitation that might tend to give him publicity.

His facility in the different languages was much marvelled at. While he
was in Florence a delegation from the mountain towns of Tuscany waited
upon him and he conversed with them in their own dialect, greatly to
their surprise and satisfaction.

From a number of incidents in this journey, related by Rev. Samuel
Longfellow, the following has a permanent interest:

When the party came to Verona in May, 1869, they found Ruskin elevated on
a ladder, from which he was examining the sculpture on a monument. As
soon as he heard that the Longfellow party was below, he came down and
greeted them very cordially. He was glad that they had stopped at Verona,
which was so interesting and so often overlooked; he wanted them to
observe the sculptures on the monument,--the softly-flowing draperies
which seemed more as if they had been moulded with hands than cut with a
chisel. He then spoke in grievous terms of the recent devastation by the
floods in Switzerland, which had also caused much damage in the plains of
Lombardy. He thought that reservoirs ought to be constructed on the sides
of the mountains, which would stay the force of the torrents, and hold
the water until it could be made useful. He wished that the Alpine Club
would take an interest in the matter. After enjoying so much in
Switzerland it would be only fair for them to do something for the
benefit of the country. Mr. Appleton then said: "That is a work for
government to do;" to which Ruskin replied: "Governments do nothing but
fill their pockets, and issue this,"--taking out a handful of Italian
paper currency, which was then much below par.

Everyone has his or her favorite poet or poets, and it is a common
practice with young critics to disparage one in order to elevate another.
Longfellow was the most popular American poet of his time, but there were
others besides Edgar A. Poe who pretended to disdain him. I have met more
such critics in Cambridge than in England, Germany, or Italy; and the
reason was chiefly a political one. At a distance Longfellow's politics
attracted little attention, but in Cambridge they could not help being
felt. In 1862 a strong movement emanated from the Harvard Law-School to
defeat Sumner and Andrew, and the lines became drawn pretty sharply. As
it happened, the prominent conservatives with one or two exceptions all
lived to the east and north of the college grounds, while Longfellow,
Lowell, Doctor Francis (who baptized Longfellow's children), Prof. Asa
Gray, and other liberals lived at the west end; and the local division
made the contest more acrimonious. The conservatives afterwards felt the
bitterness of defeat, and it was many years before they recovered from
this. A resident graduate of Harvard, who was accustomed to converse on
such subjects as the metaphysics of Hamilton's quaternions, once said
that Longfellow was the paragon of schoolgirls, because he wrote what
they would like to so much better than they could. This was contemptible
enough; but how can one expect a man who discourses on the metaphysics of
Hamilton's quaternions to appreciate Longfellow's art, or any art pure
and simple. "Evangeline," which is perhaps the finest of Longfellow's
poems, is not a favorite with youthful readers.

He was greater as a man, perhaps, than as a poet. Future ages will have
to determine this; but he was certainly one of the best poets of his
time. Professor Hedge, one of our foremost literary critics, spoke of him
as the one American poet whose verses sing themselves; and with the
exception of Bryant's "Robert of Lincoln," and Poe's "Raven," and a few
other pieces, this may be taken as a judicious statement.

Longfellow's unconsciousness is charming, even when it seems childlike.
As a master of verse he has no English rival since Spenser. The trochaic
meter in which "Hiawatha" is written would seem to have been his own
invention; [Footnote: At least I can remember no other long poem composed
in it.] and is a very agreeable change from the perpetual iambics of
Byron and Wordsworth. "Evangeline" is perhaps the most successful
instance of Greek and Latin hexameter being grafted on to an English
stem. Matthew Arnold considered it too dactylic, but the lightness of its
movement personifies the grace of the heroine herself. Lines like
Virgil's

"Illi inter sese multa vi brachia tollunt
In numerum, versantque tenaci forcipe massam,"

would not have been suited to the subject.

It has often been said that "Hiawatha" does not represent the red man as
he really is, and this is true. Neither does Tennyson represent the
knights of King Arthur's court as they were in the sixth century A.D.
They are more like modern English gentlemen, and when we read the German
Neibelungen we recognize this difference. Virgil's Aeneid does not belong
to the period of the Trojan war, but this does not prevent the Aeneid
from being very fine poetry. The American Indian is not without his
poetic side, as is proved by the squaw who knelt down on a flowery
Brussels carpet, and smoothing it with her hands, said: "Hahnsome!
hahnsome! heaven no hahnsomer!" There is true poetry in this; and so
there is in the Indian cradle-song:

"The poor little bee that lives in the tree;
The poor little bee that lives in the tree;
Has but one arrow in his quiver."

Either of these incidents is sufficient to testify to Longfellow's
"Hiawatha."

The best poetry is that which forces itself upon our memories, so that it
becomes part of our life without the least effort of recollection. Such
are Emerson's "Problem," Whittier's "Barbara Frietchie," and Longfellow's
"Santa Filomena."

"Whene'er a noble deed is wrought,
Whene'er is spoken a noble thought,
Our hearts in glad surprise
To higher levels rise."

Those are fortunate in this life who feel the glad surprise of
Longfellow.

"Hiawatha" is equally universal in its application to modern life. The
questions of the Indian boy and the replies of his nurse, the good
Nikomis, are not confined to the life of the aborigines. Every spirited
boy is a Hiawatha, and in one form or another goes through the same
experiences that Longfellow has represented with such consummate art in
his American epic-idyl.

LOWELL

The Lowell family of Boston crossed over from England towards the middle
of the seventeenth century. One of their number afterwards founded the
city of Lowell, by establishing manufactures on the Merrimac River, late
in the eighteenth century; and in more recent times two members of the
family have held the position of judge in the Supreme Court of
Massachusetts. They are a family of refined intellectual tastes, as well
as of good business and professional ability, but of a retiring
disposition and not often conspicuous in public life,--a family of
general good qualities, nicely balanced between liberal and conservative,
and with a poetic vein running through it for the past hundred years or
more. In the Class of 1867 there was an Edward J. Lowell who was chosen
class odist, and who wrote poetry nearly, if not quite, as good as that
of his distinguished relative at the same period of life.

James Russell Lowell was born at Elmwood, as it is now called, on
Washington's birthday in 1819,--as if to make a good staunch patriot of
him; and, what is even more exceptional in American life, he lived and
died in the same house in which he was born. It was not such a house as
the Craigie mansion, but still spacious and dignified, and denoted very
fair prosperity for those times.

Elmwood itself extends for some thirty rods on Brattle Street, but the
entrance to the house is on a cross-road which runs down to the marshes.
Beyond Elmwood there is a stonecutter's establishment, and next to that
Mount Auburn Cemetery, which, however, was a fine piece of woodland in
Lowell's youth, called Sweet Auburn by the Harvard students, much
frequented by love-sick swains and strolling parties of youths and
maidens.

The Lowell residence was well into the country at that time. There were
few houses near it, and Boston could only be reached by a long detour in
a stage; so that an expedition to the city exhausted the better part of a
day. It was practically further in the country than Concord is at
present; and it was here that Lowell enjoyed that repose of mind which is
essential to vigorous mental development, and could find such interests
in external nature as the poet requires for the embellishment of his
verse.

He went to college at the age of fifteen, two years older than Edward
Everett, but sufficiently young to prove himself a precocious student.
Cambridge boys of good families have always been noted at Harvard for
their gentlemanly deportment. Besides this, Lowell had an immense fund of
wit and good spirits, and the two together served to make him very
popular--perhaps too much so for his immediate good. His father had
great hopes of his promising son,--that he would prove a fine scholar and
take a prominent part in the commencement exercises. He even offered the
boy a reward of two hundred dollars in case this should happen; but the
attractions of student and social life proved too strong for James. He
was quick at languages, but slow in mathematics, and as for Butler's
analogy he cannot be blamed for the aversion with which he regarded it.
He writes a letter in which he confesses to peeping over the professor's
shoulder to see what marks have been given for his recitations, so that
his father's exhortation would seem at one time to have been seriously
felt by him; but the effort did not last long, and we find him repeatedly
reprimanded for neglect of college duties.

He did not live the life of a roaring blade, but more like the humming-
bird that darts from one plant to another, and gathers sweetness from
every flower in the garden. Finally he was rusticated, just after he had
been elected poet of his class, with directions not to return until
commencement. We recognize the Puritanic severity of President Quincy in
this sentence, which robbed young Lowell of the pleasantest term of
college life, as well as the honor of appearing on the stage on Class
Day. That his poem should have been read by another to the assembled
families of his classmates, served to make his absence more conspicuous.
Nor can we discover any sufficient reason for such hard statement.

At the same age that Longfellow was writing for the _United States
Literary Gazette_, Lowell was scribbling verses for an undergraduates'
periodical called _Harvardiana_. They were not very serious
productions, and might all be included under the head of bric-a-brac; but
there was a-plenty of them. While Longfellow's verse at nineteen was
remarkable for its perfection of form, Lowell's suffered chiefly from a
lack of this. He had an idea that poetry ought to be an inspiration of
the moment; a good foundation to begin with, but which he found
afterwards it was necessary to modify.

In the preface to one of his Biglow Papers he speaks of his life in
Concord as being

"As lazy as the bream
Which only thinks to head up stream."

The men whom he chiefly associated with there were named Barziliai and
Ebenezer, and the hoar frost of the Concord meadows would seem to have
had a chilling effect on Lowell's naturally tolerant and amiable
disposition. He was not attracted by Emerson at this time, but, on the
contrary, would seem to have felt an aversion to him. The following lines
in his class poem could not have referred to anyone else:

"Woe for Religion, too, when men who claim
To place a 'Reverend' before their name
Ascend the Lord's own holy place to preach
In strains that Kneeland had been proud to reach;
And which, if measured by Judge Thatcher's scale,
Had doomed their author to the county jail!
Alas that _Christian ministers_ should dare
To preach the views of Gibbon and Voltaire!"

To confound the strong spiritual assertion of Emerson with the purely
negative attitude of the French satirist was a common mistake in those
days, and the Lowell of 1838 needs small excuse for it. He must have been
in a biting humor at this time, for there is a cut all round in his class
poem, although it is the most vigorous and highly-finished production of
his academic years.

After college came the law, in which he succeeded as well as youthful
attorneys commonly do; and at the age of twenty-five he entered into the
holy bonds of matrimony.

The union of James Russell Lowell to Maria White, of Watertown, was the
most poetic marriage of the nineteenth century, and can only be compared
to that of Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning. Miss White was herself
a poetess, and full of poetical impulse to the brim. Maria would seem to
have been born in the White family as Albinos appear in Africa,--for the
sake of contrast. She shone like a single star in a cloudy sky,--a pale,
slender, graceful girl, with eyes, to use Herrick's expression, "like a
crystal glasse." A child was born where she did not belong, and Lowell
was the chivalrous knight who rescued her.

It must have been Maria White who made an Emersonian of him. Margaret
Fuller had stirred up the intellectual life of New England women to a
degree never known before or since, and Miss White was one of those who
came within the scope of her influence. [Footnote: Lowell himself speaks
of her as being "considered transcendental."] She studied German, and
translated poems from Uhland, who might be called the German Longfellow.
Certain it is that from the time of their marriage his opinions not only
changed from what they had been previously, but his ideas of poetry,
philosophy, and religion became more consistent and clearly defined. The
path that she pointed out to him, or perhaps which they discovered
together, was the one that he followed all through life; so that in one
of his later poems, he said, half seriously, that he was ready to adopt
Emerson's creed if anyone could tell him just what it was.

The life they lived together was a poem in itself, and reminds one of
Goethe's saying, that "he who is sufficiently provided for within has
need of little from without." They were poor in worldly goods, but rich
in affection, in fine thoughts, and courageous endeavor. It is said that
when they were married Lowell had but five hundred dollars of his own.
They went to New York and Philadelphia, and soon discovering that they
had spent more than half of it, they concluded to return home.

The next ten years of Lowell's life might be called the making of the
man. He worked hard and lived economically; earning what he could by the
law, and what he could not by magazine writing, which paid poorly enough.
Publishers had not then discovered that what the general public desires
is not literature, but information on current topics, and this is the
last thing which the true man of letters is able to provide. A magazine
article, or a campaign biography of General Grant, could be written in a
few weeks, but a solid historical biography of him, with a critical
examination of his campaigns, has not yet been written, and perhaps never
will be. A literary venture of Lowell and his friends in 1843, to found a
first-rate literary magazine, proved a failure; and it is to be feared
that he lost money by it. [Footnote: See Scudder's Life of Lowell,
iii. 109.]

However the world might use him he was sure of comfort and happiness at
his own fireside, where he read Shelley, and Keats, and Lessing, while
Mrs. Lowell studied upon her German translations. The sympathy of a true-
hearted woman is always valuable, even when she does not quite understand
the grievance in question, but the sympathy that Maria Lowell could give
her husband was of a rare sort. She could sympathize with him wholly in
heart and intellect. She encouraged him to fresh endeavors and continual
improvement. Thus he went on year by year broadening his mind,
strengthening his faculties, and improving his reputation. The days of
frolicsome gaiety were over. He now lived in a more serious vein, and
felt a deeper, more satisfying happiness. It was much more the ideal life
of a poet than that of Thoreau, paddling up and down Concord River in
search of the inspiration which only comes when we do not think of it.

It may be suspected that he read more literature than law during these
years, and we notice that he did not go, like Emerson, to the great
fountain-heads of poetry,--to Homer or Dante, Shakespeare or Goethe,--but
courted the muse rather among such tributaries as Virgil, Moliere,
Chaucer, Keats, and Lessing. It may have been better for him that he
began in this manner; but a remark that Scudder attributes to him in
regard to Lessing gives us an insight into the deeper mechanism of his
mind. "Shelley's poetry," he said, "was like the transient radiance of
St. Elmo's fire, but Lessing was wholly a poet." This is exactly the
opposite of the view he held during his college life, for Lessing worked
in a methodical and painstaking manner and finished what he wrote with
the greatest care.

More than this, Lessing was as Lowell realized afterwards, too critical
and polemical to be wholly a poet. His "Emilia Galotti" still holds a
high position on the German stage and has fine poetic qualities, but it
is written in prose. His "Nathan the Wise" was written in verse, but did
not prove a success as a drama. In one he attacked the tyranny of the
German petty princes, and in the other the intolerance of the Established
Church. We may assume that is the reason why Lowell admired them; but
Lowell was also too critical and polemic to be wholly a poet,--except on
certain occasions. In 1847 he published the "Fable for Critics," the
keenest piece of poetical satire since Byron's "English Bards and Scotch
Reviewers,"--keen and even saucy, but perfectly good-humored. About the
same time he commenced his "Biglow Papers," which did not wholly cease
until 1866, and were the most incisive and aggressive anti-slavery
literature of that period. Soon afterwards he wrote "The Vision of Sir
Launfal," which has become the most widely known of all his poems, and
which contains passages of the purest a priori verse. Goethe, who
exercised so powerful an influence on Emerson, does not appear to have
interested Lowell at all.

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