JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL

1819-1891

LOWELL might be forgiven if in later life he had grown jealous of Hosea Biglow. The Biglow Papers shone with a brilliancy which, in the eyes of the ordinary reader, put out the flame of a lifetime of serious versifying. By many admirers of the Papers it seems almost to be forgotten even now that their author was a poet by profession. Certainly very few act as if they were aware that his poetry is of a kind particularly requiring quiet, intelligent, and, I may say, continuous, study. Not that his crusade of satire against slavery was a casual adventure, or tour de force, outside of his regular course. On the contrary, it was a natural stage in his career, and ought to be reckoned as one of its milestones. He did not belong to the old order of poets. They were by profession, as it might happen, soldiers and sailors, courtiers, diplomatists, politicians, churchmen, mystics, dramatists, men of letters, first. By compulsion of imagination, or by accident, they were poets afterwards. As little is he to be classed among those who in these latter days have fenced round for themselves a life apart, as a shrine for their chosen Muse. It could not have occurred to him to appropriate his age, with its joys, troubles, and interests, as mere material and incentive for inspiration. He never dissembled either his occupation of poet, or that as poet he was citizen also, and fighter, and preacher. Wherever the battle of humanity was hottest, there was he to be found, with his lyre. In the intervals

he mounted the pulpit. His poems, the serious as much as the burlesque and satirical, the Ghost-Seer, and Hunger and Cold, equally with the Biglow Papers, are part of the history of the period and its thought. Justly to appreciate either sort, his reader must in memory, or in fancy, descend into the field, and imagine himself a combatant.

A necessary result is some risk of confusing in the poetry matter and spirit. The ethereal is apt to get chained to an incident antiquated or dead. When the subject-matter is philosophy, it is philosophy blown red-hot with disputation. The song, which at the time it was sung was itself the comment, now itself wants commentaries. Not everybody is able, and comparatively few are at pains, to read between the lines. Then too the poet's impetuous fluency adds to the turmoil. His fancy exulting in the chances of a fiery conflict, whether to end in a victory or a rout, would burst into a rush of verse. On it sped, disdaining

to be stayed while there was a public still passionate enough to supply readers. As I turn page after page, it is tantalizing to feel that a living idea, a burning thought, is gasping for breath beneath a cinder-pile of newspaper wranglings, or of free-fights in Congress. To its lovers poetry is self-sufficing, a being with a complete life of its own, neither a conflagration, nor a scaffolding. They are no better pleased when the bard abandons party strife, and takes, as his legitimate,and normal vocation, to philosophy. Readers of Lowell are generally between Scylla and Charybdis. They are offered their choice of vital social and metaphysical problems to guess, one more intricate than another. He never sat down to write a line without a driving sense of a message to deliver, now down upon earth, and now aloft among the stars. His public is expected to follow and decipher the whole. Wisdom,

generous indignation, phosphoric wit, criticism, constructive as well as destructive, lightnings opening Heaven as they strike the earth, are all there. The pity is that too often either the thinker has overlaid the poet, or the inspiration is playing about a dead theme. It is as when a canvas has rotted under a masterpiece of art.

The poet, however, is there always, though, it may be, in the background; it is the readers, I am afraid, who are likely to be in default. The general public neither interests itself in bygone partisanships, nor has spare intelligence for dialectics. Even an enthusiast for poetry does not expect to have to keep the fire on his hearth alight with the ashes of yesterday, or steam coal. None could perceive more clearly how he missed popularity for his graver verse, or bear the loss more cheerfully, than Lowell himself:

who 's striving Parnassus to climb

1

With a whole bale of 'isms' tied together with rhyme ; 1

and, visiting Chartres,

to feed my eye,

And give to Fancy one clear holiday,

Scarce saw the minster for the thoughts it stirred ;

The painted windows, freaking gloom with glow,
Dusking the sunshine which they seem to cheer,

Meet symbol of the senses and the soul,

And the whole pile, grim with the Northman's thought
Of life and death, and doom, life's equal fee.2

When the poet in him has clear possession of the field, the sadder and more pensive phases of human experience still are those to which he turns by preference. He mourns the death of an infant son :

A cherub who had lost his way

And wandered hither, so his stay

With us was short, and 'twas most meet

That he should be no delver in earth's clod,
Nor need to pause and cleanse his feet
To stand before his God:

Oh, blest word-Evermore ! 3

The contrast between universal laughing, busy nature and the sudden pause and muteness of death surprises, and bewilders him :

The bee hums on; around the blossomed vine

Whirs the light humming-bird; the cricket chirps;
The locust's shrill alarum stings the ear;

Hard by, the cock shouts lustily; from farm to farm,
His cheery brothers, telling of the sun,
Answer, till far away the joyance dies:
We never knew before how God had filled

The summer air with happy living sounds ;

All round us seems an overplus of life,

And yet the one dear heart lies cold and still.4

He gazes down, while he shudders, at the abyss, yet deeper than the grave, which separates the nearest and dearest from the darkened mind:

There thou sittest; now and then thou moanest;

Thou dost talk with what we cannot see,

Lookest at us with an eye so doubtful,

It doth put us very far from thee;

There thou sittest; we would fain be nigh thee,
But we know that it can never be.-

Strange it is that, in this open brightness,
Thou shouldst sit in such a narrow cell;

Strange it is that thou shouldest be so lonesome
Where those are who love thee all so well;
Not so much of thee is left among us

As the hum outliving the hushed bell.5

Akin to the attraction-with more still in it of the attraction of repulsion-which draws him to the contem

plation of the mystery of death, is the impulse to picture the contrast of luxury and want. Amid scenes of careless, wasteful revelry, he ever is seeing how at the gay dancers two grim Sisters, with

Wolves' eyes, through the windows peer;
Little dream they you are near,

Hunger and Cold!—

Scatter ashes on thy head,
Tears of burning sorrow shed,
Earth! and be by Pity led
To Love's fold;

Ere they block the very door
With lean corpses of the poor,
And will hush for naught but gore,
Hunger and Cold! 6

It is like him that he allows a farewell glow of light and happiness to cheer sheer forlornness, however originating:

VOL. II

The sharp storm cuts her forehead bare,
And piercing through her garments thin,
Beats on her shrunken breast, and there
Makes colder the cold heart within.

She lingers where a ruddy glow

Streams outward through an open shutter,

Adding more bitterness to woe,

More loneness to desertion utter.

She hears a woman's voice within,

Singing sweet words her childhood knew,

And years of misery and sin

Furl off, and leave her heaven blue.

Enhaloed by a mild, warm glow,

From man's humanity apart,

She hears old footsteps wandering slow

Through the lone chambers of the heart.

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