tinted that of his friends with the colours of his
esteem. In one of the exhibitions of our National
Academy, I had a large study of a bit of Adiron-
dack forest and lake, of which one of the critics
had spoken in strongly damnatory terms, and
Lowell wrote me of it:
ELMWOOD, 2lst May 1855.
MY DEAR FRIEND," It being granted that the
earth is a hollow cube " " But I beg your pardon,
my dear sir, I granted no such thing." "Well,
then, it being necessary to the purposes of this
argument that the earth should be a hollow cube,
which is precisely the same thing, I go on to
demonstrate," etc.
Now, what does he mean by saying that your
picture is "an unpleasingly grouped assemblage
of unpleasing natural objects?" Is a hemlock
trunk unpleasing? Is the silvery-grey bole of a
sloping birch unpleasing? Is the beech stem,
plashed with wavering pools of watery sunshine,
144 A FEW OF LOWELL'S LETTERS
unpleasing? And pray tell me how, in a picture,
a thing can be "literally rendered." There is no
such matter possible. The closer the imitation,
in giving rounded or irregular shapes, perspective,
etc., on a flat surface, the greater have been the
difficulties overcome, and the greater the imagina-
tion in being able to see things as they truly are,
and not as they seem. To make a model of a
beech stem is quite another affair. We would
rather have a section of the real thing. Is there
not a difference even in daguerreotypes in favour
of the man who is enough of an artist to choose
the right moment and point of view? And even
were the tree trunk a deformed one, were it ever
so ugly, mis-shapen, warty, scrofulous, carious,
what you will, it is one of the curious psycho-
logical facts that it is yet not unpleasing. For,
while any lusus naturae in anything that breathes
is hateful, a fanciful resemblance to the diseases
and deformities of animal life in anything that
merely grows appeals at once to our sense of the
odd, the humorous, the grotesque ; or else is not
disagreeable, because it is a likeness upward and
not downward. But this glances toward a deeper
deep, and I forbear. Anyhow, I like your picture
and the idea of it ; only, you must make interest
with Aquarius to water your lake a little. But
" When they talked of their Raphaels, Correggios, and stuff,
He shifted his trumpet, and only took snuff."
Or, let me translate a., proverb from the Feejee
dialect :
A FEW OF LOWELL'S LETTERS 145
" That which we like, likes us :
No need of any fuss."
Nay, take this other, which I this moment copy
from the walls of a house just unburied at
Pompeii :
" Perchance the thing I banish, me expels;
Be chary, ostracizer, of your shells !
Madman, thou deem'st thyself sublimely free,
And ly'st on straw in that crampt cell of Thee."
Or, perhaps, this is a better translation of the last
couplet :
" Thou deem'st thyself a King, poor crazy elf,
Chained to the wall of that crampt cell, Thyself."
The Feejee Islanders (who love curried Calvinists
and minced missionary) and the Pompeians (who
got up such suicidal fireworks for the entertain-
ment of Admiral Pliny) knew a thing or two,
nevertheless !
It is a glorious, blue, north-westerly sky; the
oak woods are pink with buds; the linnets, cat-
birds, fire-hangbirds, and robins are all singing
hymeneals to the Spring, and she trembles through
all her wreaths of new-born leaves and seems
equally pleased with each of them. She does not
say, "Oh, Linnet, put yourself to school with
Maestro Catbird," nor "Be silent, Robin, my boy,
till you can sing like Signor Robert of Lincoln."
Per Bacco ! did not brave Masaccio paint St Peter
right in the streets of Florence, working a miracle
with vulgar Florentines all about him, and did
not Raphael and Michael say that the Brancacci
chapel was their school? . . .
146 A FEW OF LOWELL'S LETTERS
In a letter of a little earlier date (10th of May
1855) he gives another instance of his constant
thoughtfulness for others :
"... I saw Longfellow yesterday, and reminded
him of his promise to send you a poem; and he
renewed it, but said that he had not anything he
liked well enow to send. I told him that it did
not much matter for a long poem, and that his
name would be of service to The Crayon now that
it was seeking an introduction to the world. I
know that he means rightly, and only hope that
he will send you something while it can be of
commercial advantage to you. Don't be shocked
at my market-place view of the thing; I feel as
wise as a woman when I find anybody with a
beard who seems a worse manager than I, and
one has a right to be shrewd for his friend. Mean-
while, I send you some verses of my own, which
you may like or not, as you please. They are very
much at your service if you want them, and per-
haps Professor Lowell's name may be of use. . . .
As soon as we have a leaf or two I shall expect
a visit from you. I will write and let you know
when our winter is over. Our spring is like
that delicacy, a frozen plum pudding, which cheats
every uninitiated person into an impromptu tooth-
ache. It looks as if it ought to be hot, and it is
Nova Zembla focussed."
Following these letters there is a wide gap in
my file. I have no memorandum of the time
of his sailing for Germany, but in the letter of
May 10th he says, " Think of anything I can do
A FEW OF LOWELL'S LETTERS 147
for you on the other side. I go to Germany first " ;
and the next letter I have is dated from Dresden.
I was overworked on The Crayon, and he on his
German studies ; for he was not a man to do less
than his utmost when he had accepted his duty.
But this is dated October 14, 1855, and shows
already the renewed intellectual activity at full
swing. The wit and humour, which in our first
acquaintance only flashed out in intervals of gloom,
begin to take the upper hand again.
. . . You may lay it to anything you like, except
my having forgotten you, that I have not written
sooner. I have thought of you only too much,
for I wished, when I wrote, to send you something
for The Crayon; and not finding aught to write
about, you began to haunt me and shake your
printer's-inky locks at me only, unhappily, the case
was the reverse of Banquo's, since thou couldst
say I'd not done it. Now, this would not do. I
would not have a friendship which I value so much,
more than any contracted in these later years,
associated with any uneasy thought. So I resolved
to lay the ghost at once, as we can all blue ghosts
that haunt us, in a sea of ink. What have I to
say that I had not a month ago ? Nothing ; but
then I will write and manfully say so. I can, at
least, tell you how warm a feeling I have towards
you, and that is something. But for The Crayon ?
That we will see presently. First, I must thank
you for the likeness of yourself, which you may
be sure I am glad to have with me, and for your
148 A FEW OF LOWELL'S LETTERS
letters. Only, why so short? One would think
you were writing across Broadway instead of the
Atlantic. But I will give it a good turn by think-
ing that you do not feel me far away from you,
as truly I am not. About Griswold and the rest
of it I understand nothing, and care as little, unless
for its troubling you. When I get over here, it is
the Styx that is between me and America. I have
drunk Lethe water to wash down Nepenthe with,
and have forgotten everything but my friends,
like a happy shade. What care we careless spirits
for what troubled us in the flesh? "My little
man," says Wordsworth to Pope, when they meet
in the Fortunate Islands, "I am sorry to say"
the wretch ! he is not sorry a bit " that your
poems are not so much read as once." " My what ?
Ah ! poems yes, I think I did write some things
once. And so they don't read 'em, eh? 'Tis all
one for that I wouldn't read 'em myself. Come
in, Mr a a I beg your pardon ah, Woodwarth ?
Yes, come in, Mr Woodwarth, and try the Lethe :
'tis the best spring in the place; and you will
meet some eminent characters in the pump-room."
So it goes. Give yourself no more trouble about
the picture. As it is one, I suppose I may say
hang the picture ! But I dare be sworn you have
forgotten all about it by this time.
But for The Crayon what have I seen? Why,
I have seen the Van Eyck at Ghent, and liked it
so well that I have never a word to say about it.
And I saw the Memlings at Bruges what a place
it is! a bit of Italy drifted away northward and
A FEW OF LOWELL'S LETTERS 149
stranded like an erratic boulder in Flanders and
I liked those so well that I am equally dumb there-
anent. And I saw the Rubenses in Antwerp,
which have all been skinned alive by the restorers,
and which they have put into a little room fenced
off from the cathedral, so that they may get a
franc out of every stranger who comes there
the Jews ! " Is not my Father's house a house of
prayer ? But ye have made it a den of thieves."
There has been great power and passion in those
pictures Rubens is a poem translated out of Low
Dutch into Italian ; but in the little doghole where
they are, one cannot see them. What was meant
to be seen at forty feet shall one see at fifteen ?
Offer a man a magnifying-glass to look at an
elephant with ! Somehow I feel inclined to say
" He was a great gentleman, that Rubens," but
great man seems a little too much. But great he
surely was in some sense or other you feel that.
Then I saw all the Dutch pictures at the Hague ;
but I think that Rembrandt, the greatest imagina-
tion these low countries ever produced, is better
seen here in Dresden, than at the Hague. As for
Paul Potter's famous Bull, it is no more to be
compared with Rosa Bonheur's Horse Fair than
a stuffed and varnished dolphin with a living one.
Here there are some wonderful pictures. Titian's
Tribute-Money is marvellously great ; the head
of Christ the noblest and most pathetic I have
ever seen, full of a magnificent sadness. There is
also a truly delicious Claude, and deep rock-em-
bedded bay so liquidly dark and cool ! There is a
150 A FEW OF LOWELL'S LETTERS
Holy Family by Holbein, too, pathetically prosaic.
I forgot to speak of an Albert Diirer at the Hague,
a portrait of the future emperor (Maximilian, I
think) as a child of three years, with an apple in
his hand instead of the globe of empire which
was afterward, if I remember, so heavy for him.
Is it not a pretty fancy? But I have really got
something for The Crayon this is not, but must
wait till next week's mail an account of a visit
I made to Retsch. It is late now, and I am not
in a good mood, either. I have heard bad news
not of M., thank God !
You might make an item out of this that the
King of Saxony allows no copies to be made in
the gallery, in order that the artists here may
choose original subjects and paint them out of
their own experience. Also Bendemann (their
best painter here) is making a good picture, very
pure and classic, out of the meeting of Ulysses
with Nausicaa, in the Odyssey. But I must say
good-night and God bless you! I have so much
writing of German to do that my eyes can't bear
much night work, and it is near twelve. Sunday
is my only holiday. Next week, then. . . .
The visit to Retsch never came. Lowell always
planned more than any mortal man could do; he
laid schemes of work like bridges with one abut-
ment in time and the other in eternity. He had
too much to do, and I, on the other side, became
so overborne by my editorial duties The Crayon
going to leeward all the time then that our
A FEW OF LOWELL'S LETTERS 151
correspondence flagged. The next word I have
from him shows the man overworked and de-
jected, but doing his duty to his position.
DRESDEN, 18th FeVy 1856.
MY DEAR FRIEND, I reproach myself bitterly
for not having sooner answered your letter, but
what is the use of spurring an already beaten-
out horse? What energy can self-reproach com-
municate to a man who has barely resolution
enough to do what is necessary for the day,
and who shoves everything else over into the
never-coming to-morrow? To say all in one
word, I have been passing a very wretched
winter. I have been out of health and out of
spirits, gnawed a great part of the time by an
insatiable home-sickness, and deprived of my
usual means of ridding myself of bad thoughts
by putting them into verse; for I have always
felt that I was here for the specific end of
learning German, and not of pleasing myself.
Just now I am better in body and mind. My
cure has been wrought by my resolving to run
away for a month into Italy. Think of it
Italy ! I shall see Page and Norton and the
grave of our little Walter.* I can hardly believe
that I am going, and in ten days.
What you tell me about The Crayon, you
may be sure fills me with a very sincere regret.
It does not need to tell you how much interest
* Lowell's little boy, who died at Rome, and is buried in the
Protestant cemetery there.
152 A FEW OF LOWELL'S LETTERS
I took in it and you ; and, what is better, my
interest in it was not that merely of a friend of
yours, but sprang from a conviction that it would
do much for the aesthetic culture of our people.
I am very sorry on every account that it is to be
given up. I had hoped so much from it. It is a
consolation to me that you will be restored to
the practice instead of the criticism and exposi-
tion of art, and that we shall get some more
pictures like the one which took so strong a
hold of me in the New York exhibition. I shall
hope to become the possessor of one myself, after
I get quietly settled again at Elmwood with
the Old Man of the Sea of my first course of
lectures off my shoulders. You must come and
make me a visit, and I will show you some nice
studies of landscape in our neighbourhood, and
especially one bit of primitive forest that I know
within a mile and a half of our house.
I have been studying like a dog no, dogs don't
study, I mean a learned pig this winter, and I
think my horizon has grown wider, and that when
I come back I shall be worth more to my friends.
I have learned the boundaries of my knowledge,
and Terra Incognita does not take so much space
on my maps. In German, I have every reason
to be satisfied with my progress, though I should
have learned more of the colloquial language if
I had had spirits enough to go into any society.
But already the foreboding of Italy fills me with
a new life and soul. I feel as if I had been living
with no outlook on my south side, and as if a
A FEW OF LOWELL'S LETTERS 153
wall had been toppled over which had darkened
all my windows in that direction. Bodily
and spiritually I have suffered here with cold,
but, God be thanked, it will soon be over.
My great solace (or distraction) has been the
theatre, which is here excellent. I not only get a
lesson in German, but I have learned much of the
technology of the stage. For historical accuracy
in costume and scenery, I have never seen any-
thing comparable. An artistic nicety and scrupu-
lousness extends itself to the most inconsidered
trifles in which so much of illusion consists, and
which commonly are so bungled as to draw
attention instead of evading it by an absorption
in the universal.
If I had known that I was going to London,
I should have been extremely pleased to have
made the acquaintance of Ruskin. But my jour-
ney thither was sudden and flighty, and I saw
nobody except Hogarth, Turner, and Rembrandt.
Hogarth's Marriage a la Mode and Rembrandt's
Jacob's Dream, at Dulwich College, gave me
invaluable suggestions.
It will not be long now, I hope, before I see
you at Elmwood; for you must make me a
visit as soon as I get warm in my study again.
It is all Berg ab now, and I shall ere long feel
the swing of our Atlantic once more. The very
thought revives me. We seaboard fellows cannot
live long without snuffing salt water. Let me
hear from you in Italy; tell me what you are
painting and all about yourself. As soon as I
154 A FEW OF LOWELL'S LETTERS
am myself again, I shall try to make my friend-
ship of some worth to you. But always I am
your affectionate friend,
J. R. L.
The next gap in the correspondence is one of
over a year. I do not remember, and have no
record of the time, when he married his second
wife, Frances Dunlap; but the revolution she
brought about in his life had begun before his
friends knew the causes of it. She was one of
the rarest and most sympathetic creatures I have
ever known. She was the governess of Lowell's
daughter, when I first went to stay at Elmwood,
and I then felt the charm of her character. She
was a sincere Swedenborgian, with the serene
faith and spiritual outlook I have generally found
to be characteristic of that sect ; with a warmth
of spiritual sympathy of which I have known
few so remarkable instances ; a fine and subtle
faculty of appreciation, serious and tender, which
was to Lowell like an enfolding of the Divine Spirit.
The only particular in which the sympathy failed
was in the feeling that she had in regard to his
humorous poems. She disliked the vein. It was
not that she lacked humour or the appreciation
of his, but she thought that kind of literature
unworthy of him. This she said to me more than
once. But, aside from this, she fitted him like the
air around him. He had felt the charm of her
character before he went to Europe, and had begun
to bend to it ; but, as he said to me after his mar-
A FEW OF LOWELL'S LETTERS 155
riage, he would make no sign till he had tested
by a prolonged absence the solidity of the feeling
he had felt growing up. He waited, therefore,
till his visit to Germany had satisfied him that it
was sympathy, and not propinquity, that lay at
the root of his inclination for her, before declaring
himself. No married life could be more fortunate
in all respects except one they had no children.
But for all that his life required she was to him
healing from sorrow and a defence against all
trouble, a very spring of life and hope. A letter
from Cambridge (May 14, 1857) must have been
written in the interval between his return from
Germany and this change in his life, for he had
begun his work at the university.
... I am glad you do not forget me, though I
seem so memoryless and ungrateful. I shall be
better one of these days, I hope. While my
lectures are on my mind I am not myself, and
I seem to see all the poetry drying out of me.
I droop on my rocks and hear the surge of the
living waters, but they will not reach me till
some extraordinary springtide, and maybe not
then. . . .
When you come, I wish you to come straight
here. We can house you for a while [he was
then living with his friend, Dr Estes Howe, in
Cambridge, Elmwood having been let for a
term] at any rate, and the word "board" is
hateful to me. Just now there is a sister of
Mrs here, with the biggest baby that ever
156 A FEW OF LOWELL'S LETTERS
was seen. If the nurse were in proportion, the
house would have to be greatened. And there
is also the biggest (and nicest) young lady from
Ohio. So where could I put you at night, unless
I hung you up or leaned you up in a corner, like
a beau as you are? But the drift of things will
go on, and they will float away on it before
long, and then there will be a bed, and that
will be better. I will let you know when. I
shall be jolly and companionable by that time,
which I was not when you were here before,
for I could think of nothing but the lectures
which were before me. Perhaps you were right
about it and I have no business here. How-
ever, we die at last and go where there are no
lectures.
The apple-trees are in blossom, but I have
hardly had time to see them. Horse-chestnuts are
in leaf, and linnets and robins sing; but there
are not so many birds here as at Elm wood
not so many anywhere as there used to be, and
I think the cares of life weigh on them so that
they can't sing. We have had only a day or
two of warm weather yet. Spring seems like
an ill-arranged scene at the theatre that hitches
and won't slide forward, and we see winter
through the gaps. Bring May with you when
you come remember that. Tell me what your
plans are, and when you have arranged to come
hitherward and when you would rather. . . .
Your affectionate
J. R. L.
A FEW OF LOWELL'S LETTERS 157
In the next letter there are landmarks of our
separate journeys in life. Lowell had married
Miss Dunlap ; we had made our first excursion
to the Adirondacks; the Atlantic Monthly had
been founded, with Lowell as its editor. I had
become his contributor, as he had been mine.
In one of my letters after his marriage, I had
written to congratulate him, saying that I had
already written one letter (probably on hearing
of the engagement) and had suppressed it, as too
enthusiastic and perhaps boyish.
CAMBRIDGE, 28th October 1857.
MY DEAR STILLMAN, Thank you for your
letters, especially that from the dear old Adiron-
dacks. Though written in pencil, it did my
heart more good than my eyes harm, only it
made me homesick to be back again
"A chasing the wild-deer and following the roe."
Your last I ought to have answered a week
ago; but when I stop payment of letters I do it
altogether, and, like a man of honour, allow no
favoured creditors.
I should like the article very much. Make it
about six or seven pages (print), and at the same
time be as lively and as solid as you can. You
may have full swing. This is like ordering so
many pints of inspiration, eh ? as if Castaly
were bottled up like Congress water and sent
all over the country for sale. Well, never mind,
make it as good as you can. Instructive articles
should be sweetened as much as possible, for people
158 A FEW OF LOWELL'S LETTERS
don't naturally like to learn anything, and prefer
taking their information as much as they can
in disguise.
Why did you not send me the enthusiastic
letter you say you suppressed? I should have
been delighted with it. For God's sake, don't
let your enthusiasm go! it is your good genius.
When we have once lost it, we would give all
the barren rest of our lives to get back but a
day of it. Your letter would have hit in the
white, too, for I am as happy as I can be, and
thank God continually. I have known and
honoured my wife for years, but I find some
new good in her daily. So you may be as warm
as you like in your congratulations. . . .
Affectionately yours,
J. R. LOWELL.
I think it was in the summer of the next year
that I went to Cambridge to live, and was
thenceforward mainly divided in my occupations
between the Adirondacks and the vicinity of
"the Oaks" at Waverley until I went to Europe,
in the autumn of 1859. Each summer we made
an excursion into the Adirondacks, and formed
the club which took its name from that region.
Under the circumstances, few letters passed be-
tween us, for we were not long without seeing
each other until I went abroad. Lowell was
indeed very happy in his married life, and
amongst the pictures Memory will keep on her
tablet for me, till Death passes his sponge over
A FEW OF LOWELL'S LETTERS 159
it once for all, is one of his wife lying in a long
chair under the trees at Dr Howe's, when the
sun was getting cool, and laughing with her low,
musical laugh at a contest in punning between
Lowell and myself, hand passibus cequis, but in
which he found enough to provoke his wit to
activity; her almost Oriental eyes twinkling with
fun, half closed and flashing from one to the
other of us; her low, sweet forehead, wide
between the temples; mouth wreathing with
humour; and the whole frame, lithe and fragile,
laughing with her eyes at his extravagant and
rollicking word-play. One would hardly have
said that she was a beautiful woman, but fasci-
nating she was in the happiest sense of the
word, with all the fascination of pure and
perfect womanhood and perfect happiness.
In those days the boy was still riotous in
Lowell ; and, until the war came, with its heart-
breaking for him and his, and he entered into
the larger sphere of public affairs, the escapades
of his overflowing and juvenile vitality were
irrepressible. In the Adirondacks he cast off
all dignity, was one of the best and most
devoted shots with the rifle, but proposed to
introduce, by regulation, archery for our deer-
hunting. He was the life of the company, al-
ways running over with fun and contrivance of
merriment. I remember once, coming home from
Boston with those members of the Saturday Club
who lived in Cambridge Agassiz, Howe, Holmes,
Lowell, and others, that in the midst of a grave
160 A FEW OF LOWELL'S LETTERS
discussion between Agassiz and himself upon