No More Learning

The embrace, on Lowell's
part as on that of most such aspirants, was at first more tender than
coercive; and he was no exception to the immemorial rule of pro-
pitiating the idol with verse. This verse took in 1841 the form of his
first book; a collection of poems elsewhere printed and unprinted, but
not afterwards republished.
His history from this time, at least for many years, would be
difficult to write save as a record of stages, phases, dates too particu-
lar for a summary. The general complexion of the period is best
presented in the simple statement that he was able to surrender on
the spot to his talent and his taste. There is something that fairly
charms, as we look at his life, in the almost complete elimination of
interference or deviation: it makes a picture exempt from all shadow
of the usual image of genius hindered or inclination blighted. Drama
and disaster could spring as little from within as from without; and
no one in the country probably led a life-certainly for so long a
time-of intellectual amenity so great in proportion to its intensity.
There was more intensity perhaps for such a spirit as Emerson's: but
there was, if only by that fact, more of moral ravage and upheaval;
there was less of applied knowledge and successful form, less of the
peace of art.
Emerson's utterance, his opinions, seem to-day to give
us a series, equally full of beauty and void of order, of noble exper-
iments and fragments. Washington Irving and Longfellow, on the


## p. 9231 (#247) ###########################################

JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL
9231
other hand, if they show us the amenity, show us also, in their
greater abundance and diffusion, a looseness, an exposure; they sit as
it were with open doors, more or less in the social draught. Haw-
thorne had further to wander and longer to wait; and if he too, in
the workshop of art, kept tapping his silver hammer, it was never
exactly the nail of thought that he strove to hit on the head. What
is true of Hawthorne is truer still of Poe; who, if he had the peace
of art, had little of any other. Lowell's evolution was all in what I
have called his saturation, in the generous scale on which he was
able to gather in and to store up impressions. The three terms of
his life for most of the middle time were a quiet fireside, a quiet
library, a singularly quiet community. The personal stillness of the
world in which for the most part he lived, seems to abide in the
delightful paper-originally included in 'Fireside Travels' on 'Cam-
bridge Thirty Years Ago. ' It gives the impression of conditions.
in which literature might well become an alternate world, and old
books, old authors, old names, old stories, constitute in daily com-
merce the better half of one's company. Complications and dis-
tractions were not, even so far as they occurred, appreciably his own
portion; except indeed for their being-some of them, in their degree
- of the general essence of the life of letters. If books have their
destinies, they have also their antecedents; and in the face of the
difficulty of trying for perfection with a rough instrument, it cannot
of course be said that even concentration shuts the door upon pain.
If Lowell had all the joys of the scholar and the poet, he was also,
and in just that degree, not a stranger to the pangs and the weari-
ness that accompany the sense of exactitude, of proportion, and of
beauty; that feeling for intrinsic success, which in the long run
becomes a grievous burden for shoulders that have in the rash con-
fidence of youth accepted it,- becomes indeed in the artist's breast
the incurable, intolerable ache.
But such drama as could not mainly, after all, be played out
within the walls of his library, came to him, on the whole, during
half a century, only in two or three other forms. I mention first the
subordinate, which were all, as well, in the day's work: the long
grind of teaching the promiscuous and preoccupied young, and those.
initiations of periodical editorship which, either as worries or as tri-
umphs, may never perhaps be said to strike very deep. In 1855 he
entered, at Harvard College, upon the chair just quitted by Longfel
low: a comprehensive professorship in literature, that of France and
that of Spain in particular. He conducted on its foundation, for four
years, the Atlantic Monthly; and carried on from 1862, in conjunc-
tion with Mr. Charles Eliot Norton, the North American Review, in
which his best critical essays appeared. There were published the


## p. 9232 (#248) ###########################################

9232
JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL
admirable article on Lessing, that on 'Rousseau and the Sentiment-
alists,' that on Carlyle's 'Frederick the Great,' the rich, replete paper
on Witchcraft,' the beautiful studies (1872-1875) of Dante, Spenser,
and Wordsworth; and the brilliant jeux d'esprit, as their overflow of
critical wit warrants our calling them, on such subjects as (1866)
sundry infirmities of the poetical temper of Swinburne, or such occas-
ions as were offered (1865) by the collected writings of Thoreau, or
(1867) by the 'Life and Letters' of James Gates Percival,- occasions
mainly to run to earth a certain shade of the provincial spirit. Of
his career from early manhood to the date of his going in 1877 as
minister to Spain, the two volumes of his correspondence published
in 1893 by Mr. Norton give a picture reducible to a presentment of
study in happy conditions, and of opinions on "moral" questions; an
image subsequently thrown somewhat into the shade, but still keep-
ing distinctness and dignity for those who at the time had something
of a near view of it.
Lowell's great good fortune was to believe for
so long that opinions and study sufficed him. There came in time
a day when he lent himself to more satisfactions than he literally
desired; but it is difficult to imagine a case in which the literary life
should have been a preparation for the life of the world. There was
so much in him of the man and the citizen, as well as of the poet
and the professor, that with the full reach of curiosities and sympa-
thies, his imagination found even in narrow walls, windows of long
range. It was during these years, at any rate, that his poetical and
critical spirit were formed; and I speak of him as our prime man of
letters precisely on account of the unhurried and unhindered process
of the formation. Literature was enough, without being too much,
his trade: it made of his life a reservoir never condemned, by too
much tapping, to show low water. We have had critics much more
frequent, but none more abundant; we have had poets more abund-
ant, but none more acquainted with poetry. This acquaintance with
poetry bore fruits of a quality to which I shall presently allude;
his critical activity, meantime, was the result of the impulse given
by the responsibilities of instructorship to the innermost turn of his
mind. His studies could deepen and widen at their ease. The uni-
versity air soothed, but never smothered; Europe was near enough
to touch, but not tormentingly to overlap; the intimate friends were
more excellent than numerous, the college feasts just recurrent
enough to keep wit in exercise, and the country walks not so blank
as to be unsweetened by a close poetic notation of every aspect and
secret of nature. He absorbed and lectured and wrote, talked and
edited and published; and had, the while, struck early in the day
the note from which, for a long time, his main public identity was
to spring.


## p. 9233 (#249) ###########################################

JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL
9233
This note, the first of the 'Biglow Papers,' was sounded in the
summer of 1846, the moment of the outbreak of the Mexican War.
It presented not quite as yet so much an "American humorist" the
more, as the very possibility or fact of the largest expressiveness in
American humor. If he was the first of the dialectic and colloquial
group in the order of time, so he was to remain, on this ground, the
master and the real authority. The 'Biglow Papers' were an acci-
dent, begun without plan or forecast: but by the accident the author
was, in a sense, determined and prompted; he himself caught from
them and from their success a fuller idea of the "Yankee » character,
lighted up by every advantage that wit and erudition could lend it.
Lowell found himself, on the spot, committed to giving it such aid
to literary existence as it could never have had without him. His
conception of all the fine things of the mind-of intelligence, hon-
esty, judgment, knowledge—was placed straight at the service of the
kind of American spirit that he was conscious of in himself, and that
he sought in his three or four typical figures to make ironic and
racy.
The 'Biglow Papers' are in this relation an extraordinary perform.
ance and a rare work of art: in what case, on the part of an artist,
has the national consciousness, passionately acute, arrived at a form
more independent, more objective? If they were a disclosure of this
particular artist's humor, and of the kind of passion that could most
possess him, they represent as well the element that for years gave
his life its main enlargement, and as may be said its main agitation,
-the element that preserved him from dryness, from the danger of
the dilettante. This safeguard was his care for public things and
national questions; those to which, even in his class-rooms and
polishings of verse, all others were subordinate. He was politically
an ardent liberal, and had from the first engaged with all the force
of his imagination on the side that has figured at all historical
moments as the cause of reform. Reform, in his younger time, meant
above all resistance to the extension of slavery; then it came to
mean- and by so doing, to give occasion during the Civil War to a
fresh and still finer Biglow' series-resistance to the pretension of
the Southern States to set up a rival republic. The two great im-
pulses he received from without were given him by the outbreak of
the war, and-after these full years and wild waves had gradually
ebbed by his being appointed minister to Spain. The latter event
began a wholly new period, though serving as a channel for much,
for even more perhaps, of the old current; meanwhile, at all events,
no account of his most productive phases at least can afford not to
touch on the large part, the supreme part, played in his life by the
intensity, and perhaps I may go so far as to say the simplicity, of
XVI-578
<
-


## p. 9234 (#250) ###########################################

9234
JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL
his patriotism. Patriotism had been the keynote of an infinite quan-
tity of more or less felicitous behavior; but perhaps it had never been
so much as in Lowell the keynote of reflection and of the moral
tone, of imagination and conversation. Action, in this case, could
mainly be but to feel as American as possible,—with an inevitable
overflow of course into whatever was the expression of the moment.
It might often have seemed to those who often- -or even to those
who occasionally-saw him, that his case was almost unique, and
that the national consciousness had never elsewhere been so culti-
vated save under the stress of national frustration or servitude. It
was in fact, in a manner, as if he had been aware of certain forces
that made for oppression; of some league of the nations and the arts,
some consensus of tradition and patronage, to treat as still in tutelage
or on its trial the particular connection of which he happened most
to be proud.
The secret of the situation was that he could only, could actively,
"cultivate" as a retort to cultivation. There were American phe-
nomena that, as he gathered about the world, cultivation in general
deemed vulgar; and on this all his genius rose within him to show
what his cultivation could make of them. It enabled him to make
so much that all the positive passion in his work is for the direct
benefit of patriotism. That, beyond any other irritation of the lyric
temperament, is what makes him ardent. In nothing, moreover, is
he more interesting than in the very nature of his vision of this
humorous "Yankeeism" of type. He meant something it was at that
time comparatively easy, as well as perhaps a trifle more directly
inspiring, to mean; for his life opened out backward into Puritan
solidities and dignities. However this be, at any rate, his main care
for the New England—or, as may almost be said, for the Cambridge
consciousness, as he embodied it, was that it could be fed from
as many sources as any other in the world, and assimilate them with
an ingenuity all its own: literature, life, poetry, art, wit, all the
growing experience of human intercourse. His great honor is that in
this direction he led it to high success; and if the 'Biglow Papers'
express supremely his range of imagination about it, they render the
American tone the service of placing it in the best literary company,
- that of all his other affinities and echoes, his love of the older
English and the older French, of all classics and romantics and
originals, of Dante and Goethe, of Cervantes and the Elizabethans;
his love, in particular, of the history of language and of the com-
plex questions of poetic form. If they had no other distinction, they
would have that of one of the acutest of all studies in linguistics.
They are more literary, in short, than they at first appear; which
is at once the strength and the weakness of his poetry in general,
-


## p. 9235 (#251) ###########################################

JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL
9235
literary indeed as most of it is at sight. The chords of his lyre were
of the precious metal, but not perhaps always of the last lyric tenu-
ity. He struck them with a hand not idle enough for mere moods,
and yet not impulsive enough for the great reverberations. He was
sometimes too ingenious, as well as too reasonable and responsible;
this leaves him, on occasion, too much in the grasp of a certain mor-
ally conservative humor,- a side on which he touches the authors of
"society" verse,- or else mixes with his emotion an intellectual sub-
stance, a something alien, that tends to stiffen and retard it. Per-
haps I only mean indeed that he had always something to say, and
his sturdiness as well as his "cleverness" about the way it should
be said. It is congruous, no doubt, with his poetic solidity that his
highest point in verse is reached by his 'Harvard Commemoration
Ode,' a poem for an occasion at once public and intimate; a sustained
lament for young lives, in the most vividly sacrificed of which he
could divide with the academic mother something of the sentiment of
proud ownership. It is unfair to speak of lines so splendid as these
as not warmed by the noble thought with which they are charged;
-even if it be of the very nature of the English ode to show us
always, at its best, something of the chill of the poetic Exercise.
-
I may refer, however, as little to the detail of his verse as to
that of the robust body of his prose. The latter consists of richly
accomplished literary criticism, and of a small group of public ad-
dresses; and would obviously be much more abundant were we in
possession of all the wrought material of Harvard lectures and pro-
fessorial talks. If we are not, it is because Lowell recognized no
material as wrought till it had passed often through the mill. He
embarked on no magnum opus, historical, biographical, critical; he
contented himself with uttering thought that had great works in its
blood. It was for the great works and the great figures he cared; he
was a critic of a pattern mainly among ourselves superseded — super-
seded so completely that he seems already to have receded into
time, and to belong to an age of vulgarity less blatant. If he was in
educated appreciation the most distinct voice that the United States
had produced, this is partly, no doubt, because the chatter of the
day and the triumph of the trivial could even then still permit him
to be audible, permit him to show his office as supported on knowl-
edge and on a view of the subject. He represented so well the use
of a view of the subject that he may be said to have represented
best what at present strikes us as most urgent; the circumstance,
namely, that so far from being a chamber surrendering itself
from the threshold to the ignorant young of either sex, criticism is
positively and miraculously not the simplest and most immediate, but
the most postponed and complicated of the arts, the last qualified
-


## p. 9236 (#252) ###########################################

9236
JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL
for and arrived at, the one requiring behind it most maturity, most
power to understand and compare.
One is disposed to say of him, in spite of his limited production,
that he belonged to the massive race, and even has for the present
the air of one of the last of it. The two volumes of his 'Letters'
help, in default of a biography, the rest of his work in testifying to
this; and would do so still more if the collection had comprised more
letters of the time of his last period in Europe. His diplomatic
years he was appointed in 1880 minister to England-form a chap-
ter by themselves; they gave a new turn to his career, and made a
different thing of what was to remain of it. They checked, save
here and there for an irrepressible poem, his literary production;
but they opened a new field-in the mother-land of "occasional »
oratory for his beautiful command of the spoken word. He spoke
often from this moment, and always with his admirable mixture of
breadth and wit; with so happy a surrender indeed to this gift that
his two finest addresses, that on 'Democracy' (Birmingham, 1884)
and that on the Harvard Anniversary of 1886, connect themselves
with the reconsecration, late in life, of his eloquence. It was a sin-
gular fortune, and possible for an American alone, that such a want
of peculiarly professional, of technical training, should have been
consistent with a degree of success that appeared to reduce train-
ing to unimportance. Nothing was more striking, in fact, than that
what Lowell had most in England to show was simply all the air
and all the effect of preparedness. If I have alluded to the best
name we can give him and the best niche we can make for him, let
this be partly because letters exactly met in him a more distin-
guished recognition than usually falls to their lot. It was they that
had prepared him really; prepared him-such is the subtlety of
their operation-even for the things from which they are most di-
vorced. He reached thus the phase in which he took from them as
much as he had given; represented them in a new, insidious way.
It was of course in his various speeches that his preparedness came
out most; most enjoyed the superlative chance of becoming, by the
very fact of its exercise, one of the safeguards of an international
relation that he would have blushed not to have done his utmost to
keep inviolable. He had the immense advantage that the very voice
in which he could speak so much at once that of his masculine,
pugnacious intellect, and that of the best side of the race— - was a
plea for everything the millions of English stock have in common.
This voice, as I may call it, that sounds equally in every form of
his utterance, was his great gift to his time. In poetry, in satire, in
prose, and on his lips, it was from beginning to end the manliest,
the most ringing, to be heard. He was essentially a fighter: he could


## p. 9237 (#253) ###########################################

JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL
9237
always begin the attack; could always, in criticism as in talk, sound
the charge and open the fire. The old Puritan conscience was deep
in him, with its strong and simple vision, even in æsthetic things, of
evil and of good, of wrong and of right; and his magnificent wit
was all at its special service. He armed it, for vindication and per-
suasion, with all the amenities, the "humanities"—with weapons as
sharp and bright as it has ever carried.
Hey Jammer
[All the poems here quoted are copyrighted, and they are reprinted by
permission of Houghton, Mifflin & Co. , publishers. ]
SI DESCENDERO IN INFERNUM, ADES
WANDERING dim on the extremest edge
O
Of God's bright providence, whose spirits sigh
Drearily in you, like the winter sedge
That shivers o'er the dead pool stiff and dry,—
A thin, sad voice, when the bold wind roars by
From the clear North of Duty,-
Still by cracked arch and broken shaft I trace
That here was once a shrine and holy place
Of the supernal beauty,
-
A child's play-altar reared of stones and moss,
With wilted flowers for offering laid across,
Mute recognition of the all-ruling Grace.
How far are ye from the innocent, from those
Whose hearts are as a little lane serene,
Smooth-heaped from wall to wall with unbroke snows,
Or in the summer blithe with lamb-cropped green,
Save the one track, where naught more rude is seen
Than the plump wain at even
Bringing home four months' sunshine bound in sheaves!
How far are ye from those! yet who believes
That ye can shut out heaven?
Your souls partake its influence, not in vain
Nor all unconscious, as that silent lane
Its drift of noiseless apple blooms receives.


## p. 9238 (#254) ###########################################

9238
JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL
Looking within myself, I note how thin
A plank of station, chance, or prosperous fate,
Doth fence me from the clutching waves of sin;
In my own heart I find the worst man's mate,
And see not dimly the smooth-hinged gate
That opes to those abysses
Where ye grope darkly,-ye who never knew
On your young hearts love's consecrating dew,
Or felt a mother's kisses,
Or home's restraining tendrils round you curled:
Ah,. side by side with heart's-ease in this world
The fatal nightshade grows, and bitter rue!
One band ye cannot break,- the force that clips
And grasps your circles to the central light;
Yours is the prodigal comet's long ellipse,
Self-exiled to the farthest verge of night:
Yet strives with you no less that inward might
No sin hath e'er imbruted;
The god in you the creed-dimmed eye eludes;
The Law brooks not to have its solitudes
By bigot feet polluted:
Yet they who watch your God-compelled return
May see your happy perihelion burn.
Where the calm sun his unfledged planets broods.
HEBE
SAW the twinkle of white feet,
I
I saw the flash of robes descending;
Before her ran an influence fleet,
That bowed my heart like barley bending.
As, in bare fields, the searching bees
Pilot to blooms beyond our finding,
It led me on, by sweet degrees
Joy's simple honey-cells unbinding.
Those Graces were, that seemed grim Fates;
With nearer love the sky leaned o'er me;
The long-sought Secret's golden gates
On musical hinges swung before me.
I saw the brimmed bowl in her grasp
Thrilling with godhood; like a lover


## p. 9239 (#255) ###########################################

JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL
9239
I sprang the proffered life to clasp;-
The beaker fell; the luck was over.
-
The earth has drunk the vintage up:
What boots it patch the goblet's splinters?
Can summer fill the icy cup,
Whose treacherous crystal is but winter's ?
O spendthrift haste! Await the gods;
The nectar crowns the lips of patience;
Haste scatters on unthankful sods
The immortal gift in vain libations.
Coy Hebe flies from those that woo,
And shuns the hands would seize upon her:
Follow thy life, and she will sue
To pour for thee the cup of honor.
SHE CAME AND WENT
SA twig trembles, which a bird
A Lights on to sing, then leaves unbent,
So is my memory thrilled and stirred; -
I only know she came and went.
As clasps some lake, by gusts unriven,
The blue dome's measureless content,
So my soul held that moment's heaven;-
I only know she came and went.
▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬
As, at one bound, our swift spring heaps
The orchards full of bloom and scent,
So clove her May my wintry sleeps; -
I only know she came and went.
-
An angel stood and met my gaze,
Through the low doorway of my tent;
The tent is struck, the vision stays; -
I only know she came and went.
Oh, when the room grows slowly dim,
And life's last oil is nearly spent,
One gush of light these eyes will brim,
Only to think she came and went.


## p. 9240 (#256) ###########################################

9240
JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL
I
THE CHANGELING
HAD a little daughter,
And she was given to me
To lead me gently backward
To the Heavenly Father's knee;
That I, by the force of nature,
Might in some dim wise divine
The depth of his infinite patience
To this wayward soul of mine.
I know not how others saw her,
But to me she was wholly fair,
And the light of the heaven she came from
Still lingered and gleamed in her hair;
For it was as wavy and golden,
And as many changes took,
As the shadows of sun-gilt ripples
On the yellow bed of a brook.
To what can I liken her smiling
Upon me, her kneeling lover?
How it leaped from her lips to her eye-lids,
And dimpled her wholly over,
Till her outstretched hands smiled also,
And I almost seemed to see
The very heart of her mother
Sending sun through her veins to me!
She had been with us scarce a twelvemonth,
And it hardly seemed a day,
When a troop of wandering angels
Stole my little daughter away;
Or perhaps those heavenly Zingari
But loosed the hampering strings,
And when they had opened her cage door,
My little bird used her wings.
But they left in her stead a changeling,
A little angel child,
That seems like her bud in full blossom,
And smiles as she never smiled:
When I wake in the morning, I see it
Where she always used to lie,
And I feel as weak as a violet
Alone 'neath the awful sky.


## p. 9241 (#257) ###########################################

JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL
9241
O
As weak, yet as trustful also:
For the whole year long I see
All the wonders of faithful Nature
Still worked for the love of me;
Winds wander, and dews drip earthward,
Rain falls, suns rise and set,
Earth whirls, and all but to prosper
A poor little violet.
This child is not mine as the first was;
I cannot sing it to rest,
I cannot lift it up fatherly
And bliss it upon my breast:
Yet it lies in my little one's cradle
And sits in my little one's chair,
And the light of the heaven she's gone to
Transfigures its golden hair.
THE VISION OF SIR LAUNFAL
PRELUDE TO PART FIRST
VER 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.


## p. 9242 (#258) ###########################################

9242
JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL
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:
'Tis heaven alone that is given away,
'Tis 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 earth if it be in tune,
And over it softly her warm ear lays;
Whether we look, or whether we listen,
We hear life mu nur, 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;


## p. 9243 (#259) ###########################################

JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL
9243
No matter how barren the past may have been,
'Tis 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;
'Tis as easy now for the heart to be true
As for grass to be green or skies to be blue,-
'Tis 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?
PART FIRST
"MY GOLDEN spurs now bring to me,
And bring to me my richest mail,
For to-morrow I go over land and sea
In search of the Holy Grail:
Shall never a bed for me be spread,
Nor shall a pillow be under my head,
Till I begin my vow to keep;
Here on the rushes will I sleep,


## p. 9244 (#260) ###########################################

9244
JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL
And perchance there may come a vision true
Ere day create the world anew. "
Slowly Sir Launfal's eyes grew dim;
Slumber fell like a cloud on him,
And into his soul the vision flew.
The crows flapped over by twos and threes,
In the pool drowsed the cattle up to their knees,
The little birds sang as if it were
The one day of summer in all the year,
And the very leaves seemed to sing on the trees:
The castle alone in the landscape lay
Like an outpost of winter, dull and gray;
'Twas the proudest hall in the North Countree,
And never its gates might opened be,
Save to lord or lady of high degree;
Summer besieged it on every side,
But the churlish stone her assaults defied;
She could not scale the chilly wall,
Though around it for leagues her pavilions tall
Stretched left and right,
Over the hills and out of sight;
Green and broad was every tent,
And out of each a murmur went
Till the breeze fell off at night.
The drawbridge dropped with a surly clang,
And through the dark arch a charger sprang,
Bearing Sir Launfal, the maiden knight,
In his gilded mail, that flamed so bright
It seemed the dark castle had gathered all
Those shafts the fierce sun had shot over its wall
In his siege of three hundred summers long,
And binding them all in one blazing sheaf,
Had cast them forth; so, young and strong,
And lightsome as a locust leaf,
Sir Launfal flashed forth in his maiden mail,
To seek in all climes for the Holy Grail.
It was morning on hill and stream and tree,
And morning in the young knight's heart;
Only the castle moodily
Rebuffed the gifts of the sunshine free,
And gloomed by itself apart;
The season brimmed all other things up
Full as the rain fills the pitcher-plant's cup.


## p. 9245 (#261) ###########################################

JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL
9245
As Sir Launfal made morn through the darksome gate,
He was 'ware of a leper, crouched by the same.
Who begged with his hand and moaned as he sate;
And a loathing over Sir Launfal came;
The sunshine went out of his soul with a thrill,
The flesh 'neath his armor 'gan shrink and crawl,
And midway its leap his heart stood still.
Like a frozen waterfall;
For this man, so foul and bent of stature,
Rasped harshly against his dainty nature,
And seemed the one blot on the summer morn,—
So he tossed him a piece of gold in scorn.
The leper raised not the gold from the dust:-
"Better to me the poor man's crust,
Better the blessing of the poor,
Though I turn me empty from his door:
That is no true alms which the hand can hold;
He gives only the worthless gold
Who gives from a sense of duty;
But he who gives but a slender mite,
And gives to that which is out of sight,—
That thread of the all-sustaining Beauty
Which runs through all and doth all unite,—
The hand cannot clasp the whole of his alms,
The heart outstretches its eager palms;
For a god goes with it and makes it store
To the soul that was starving in darkness before. "
PRELUDE TO PART SECOND
Down swept the chill wind from the mountain peak,
From the snow five thousand summers old;
On open wold and hilltop bleak
It had gathered all the cold,
And whirled it like sleet on the wanderer's cheek;
It carried a shiver everywhere
From the unleafed boughs and pastures bare;
The little brook heard it, and built a roof
'Neath which he could house him winter-proof;
All night by the white stars' frosty gleams
He groined his arches and matched his beams;
Slender and clear were his crystal spars
As the lashes of light that trim the stars;


## p. 9246 (#262) ###########################################

9246
JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL
1
He sculptured every summer delight
In his halls and chambers out of sight;
Sometimes his tinkling waters slipt
Down through a frost-leaved forest crypt,
Long, sparkling aisles of steel stemmed trees
Bending to counterfeit a breeze;
Sometimes the roof no fretwork knew
But silvery mosses that downward grew;
Sometimes it was carved in sharp relief
With quaint arabesques of ice-fern leaf;
Sometimes it was simply smooth and clear
For the gladness of heaven to shine through, and here
He had caught the nodding bulrush tops
And hung them thickly with diamond drops,
That crystaled the beams of moon and sun,
And made a star of every one:
No mortal builder's most rare device
Could match this winter palace of ice;
'Twas as if every image that mirrored lay
In his depths serene through the summer day,
Each fleeting shadow of earth and sky,
Lest the happy model should be lost,
Had been mimicked in fairy masonry
By the elfin builders of the frost.
Within the hall are song and laughter;
The cheeks of Christmas glow red and jolly,
And sprouting is every corbel and rafter
With lightsome green of ivy and holly;
Through the deep gulf of the chimney wide
Wallows the Yule-log's roaring tide;
The broad flame pennons droop and flap
And belly and tug as a flag in the wind;
Like a locust shrills the imprisoned sap,
Hunted to death in its galleries blind;
And swift little troops of silent sparks,
Now pausing, now scattering away as in fear,
Go threading the soot forest's tangled darks
Like herds of startled deer.
But the wind without was eager and sharp;
Of Sir Launfal's gray hair it makes a harp,
And rattles and wrings
The icy strings,


## p. 9247 (#263) ###########################################

JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL
9247
Singing in dreary monotone
A Christmas carol of its own,
Whose burden still, as he might guess,
Was "Shelterless, shelterless, shelterless! "
The voice of the seneschal flared like a torch
As he shouted the wanderer away from the porch,
And he sat in the gateway and saw all night
The great hall fire, so cheery and bold,
Through the window slits of the castle old,
Build out its piers of ruddy light
Against the drift of the cold.
PART SECOND
THERE was never a leaf on bush or tree,
The bare boughs rattled shudderingly;
The river was dumb and could not speak,
For the weaver Winter its shroud had spun;
A single crow on the tree-top bleak
From his shining feathers shed off the cold sun;
Again it was morning, but shrunk and cold,
As if her veins were sapless and old,
And she rose up decrepitly
For a last dim look at earth and sea.
Sir Launfal turned from his own hard gate,
For another heir in his earldom sate:
An old, bent man, worn out and frail,
He came back from seeking the Holy Grail.
Little he recked of his earldom's loss,
No more on his surcoat was blazoned the cross;
But deep in his soul the sign he wore,
The badge of the suffering and the poor.
Sir Launfal's raiment thin and spare
Was idle mail 'gainst the barbèd air,
For it was just at the Christmas-time;
So he mused, as he sat, of a sunnier clime,
And sought for a shelter from cold and snow
In the light and warmth of long ago.
He sees the snake-like caravan crawl
O'er the edge of the desert, black and small,
Then nearer and nearer, till, one by one,
He can count the camels in the sun,


## p. 9248 (#264) ###########################################

9248
JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL
As over the red-hot sands they pass
To where, in its slender necklace of grass,
The little spring laughed and leapt in the shade,
And with its own self like an infant played,
And waved its signal of palms.
"For Christ's sweet sake, I beg an alms: "
The happy camels may reach the spring,
But Sir Launfal sees only the grewsome thing,-
The leper, lank as the rain-blanched bone,
That cowers beside him, a thing as lone
And white as the ice-isles of Northern seas
In the desolate horror of his disease.
And Sir Launfal said, "I behold in thee
An image of Him who died on the tree;
Thou also hast had thy crown of thorns,
Thou also hast had the world's buffets and scorns,
And to thy life were not denied
The wounds in the hands and feet and side:
Mild Mary's Son, acknowledge me;
Behold, through him, I give to thee! "
Then the soul of the leper stood up in his eyes
And looked at Sir Launfal, and straightway he
Remembered in what a haughtier guise
He had flung an alms to leprosie,
When he girt his young life up in gilded mail
And set forth in search of the Holy Grail.
The heart within him was ashes and dust:
He parted in twain his single crust,
He broke the ice on the streamlet's brink,
And gave the leper to eat and drink;
'Twas a moldy crust of coarse brown bread,
'Twas water out of a wooden bowl,-
Yet with fine wheaten bread was the leper fed,
And 'twas red wine he drank with his thirsty soul.
As Sir Launfal mused with a downcast face,
A light shone round about the place;
The leper no longer crouched at his side,
But stood before him glorified,
Shining and tall and fair and straight
As the pillar that stood by the Beautiful Gate,--
Himself the Gate whereby men can
Enter the temple of God in Man.


## p. 9249 (#265) ###########################################

JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL
9249
His words were shed softer than leaves from the pine,
And they fell on Sir Launfal as snows on the brine,
That mingle their softness and quiet in one
With the shaggy unrest they float down upon;
And the voice that was softer than silence said:
XVI-579
"Lo, it is I, be not afraid!
In many climes, without avail,
Thou hast spent thy life for the Holy Grail:
Behold, it is here,- this cup which thou
Didst fill at the streamlet for me but now;
This crust is my body broken for thee,
This water His blood that died on the tree;
The Holy Supper is kept indeed
In whatso we share with another's need.
Not what we give, but what we share,-
For the gift without the giver is bare;
Who gives himself with his alms feeds three,-
Himself, his hungering neighbor, and me. "
Sir Launfal awoke as from a swound:
«The Grail in my castle here is found!
Hang my idle armor up on the wall,
Let it be the spider's banquet-hall;
He must be fenced with stronger mail
Who would seek and find the Holy Grail. "
-
-
The castle gate stands open now,
And the wanderer is welcome to the hall
As the hang-bird is to the elm-tree bough;
No longer scowl the turrets tall.
The summer's long siege at last is o'er:
When the first poor outcast went in at the door,
She entered with him in disguise,
And mastered the fortress by surprise;
There is no spot she loves so well on ground;
She lingers and smiles there the whole year round;
The meanest serf on Sir Launfal's land
Has hall and bower at his command;
And there's no poor man in the North Countree
But is lord of the earldom as much as he.


## p. 9250 (#266) ###########################################

9250
JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL
FROM THE BIGLOW PAPERS'
HRASH away, you'll hev to rattle
On them kittle-drums o' yourn,-
'Taint a knowin' kind o' cattle
Thet is ketched with moldy corn;
Put in stiff, you fifer feller,
Let folks see how spry you be,-
Guess you'll toot till you are yeller
'Fore you git ahold o' me!
THE
Thet air flag's a leetle rotten,
Hope it ain't your Sunday's best; -
Fact! it takes a sight o' cotton
To stuff out a soger's chest:
Sence we farmers hev to pay fer 't,
Ef you must wear humps like these,
S'posin' you should try salt hay fer 't,-
It would du ez slick ez grease.
'Twouldn't suit them Southun fellers:
They're a dreffle graspin' set;
We must ollers blow the bellers
W'en they want their irons het;
Maybe it's all right ez preachin',
But my narves it kind o' grates,
Wen I see the overreachin'
O' them nigger-drivin' States.
Them thet rule us, them slave-traders,
Hain't they cut a thunderin' swarth
(Helped by Yankee renegaders)
Thru the vartu o' the North!
We begin to think it's nater
To take sarse an' not be riled; -
Who'd expect to see a tater
All on eend at bein' biled?
Ez fer war, I call it murder,-
There you hev it plain an' flat;
I don't want to go no furder
Than my Testyment fer that:
God hez sed so plump an' fairly;
It's ez long ez it is broad;
An' you've gut to git up airly
Ef you want to take in God.


## p. 9251 (#267) ###########################################

JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL
9251
'Tain't your eppyletts an' feathers
Make the thing a grain more right;
'Tain't afollerin' your bell-wethers
Will excuse ye in His sight;
Ef you take a sword an' dror it,
An' go stick a feller thru,
Guv'ment ain't to answer for it,-
God '11 send the bill to you.
Wut's the use o' meetin'-goin'
Every Sabbath, wet or dry,
Ef it's right to go a-mowin'
Feller-men like oats an' rye?
I dunno but wut it's pooty
Trainin' round in bobtail coats,-
But it's curus Christian dooty
This 'ere cuttin' folks's throats.
They may talk o' Freedom's airy
Tell they're pupple in the face,-
It's a grand gret cemetary
Fer the barthrights of our race;
They jest want this Californy
So 's to lug new slave States in,
To abuse ye, an' to scorn ye,
An' to plunder ye like sin.
Ain't it cute to see a Yankee
Take sech everlastin' pains,
All to get the Devil's thankee
Helpin' on 'em weld their chains?
W'y, it's jest ez clear ez figgers,
Clear ez one an' one make two,-
Chaps thet make black slaves o' niggers
Want to make w'ite slaves o' you.
Tell ye jest the eend I've come to
Arter cipherin' plaguy smart,
An' it makes a handy sum, tu,
Any gump could larn by heart:
Laborin' man an' laborin' woman
Hev one glory an' one shame;
Ev'y thin' thet's done inhuman
Injers all on 'em the same.


## p. 9252 (#268) ###########################################

9252
JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL
'Tain't by turnin' out to hack folks
You're agoin' to git your right,
Nor by lookin' down on black folks
Coz you're put upon by w'ite;
Slavery ain't o' nary color,
'Tain't the hide thet makes it wus,
All it keers fer in a feller
'S jest to make him fill its pus.
Want to tackle me in, du ye?
I expect you'll hev to wait;
W'en cold lead puts daylight thru ye
You'll begin to kal'late;
S'pose the crows wun't fall to pickin'
All the carkiss from your bones,
Coz you helped to give a lickin'
To them poor half-Spanish drones?
Jest go home an' ask our Nancy
W'ether I'd be sech a goose
Ez to jine ye,-guess you'd fancy
The etarnal bung wuz loose!
She wants me fer home consumption,
Let alone the hay's to mow:
Ef you're arter folks o' gumption,
You've a darned long row to hoe.
Take them editors thet's crowin'
Like a cockerel three months old,
Don't ketch any on 'em goin',
Though they be so blasted bold;
Ain't they a prime lot o' fellers?
'Fore they think on't, guess they'll sprout
(Like a peach thet's got the yellers),
With the meanness bustin' out.
Wal, go 'long to help 'em stealin'
Bigger pens to cram with slaves;
Help the men thet's ollers dealin'
Insults on your fathers' graves;
Help the strong to grind the feeble;
Help the many agin the few;
Help the men thet call your people
W'itewashed slaves an' peddlin' crew!


## p. 9253 (#269) ###########################################

JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL
9253
Massachusetts, God forgive her,
She's a-kneelin' with the rest,-
She, thet ough' to ha' clung ferever
In her grand old eagle-nest;
She thet ough' to stand so fearless
IW'ile the wracks are round her hurled,
Holdin' up a beacon peerless
To the oppressed of all the world!
Hain't they sold your colored seamen ?
Hain't they made your env'ys w'iz?
Wut'll make ye act like freemen?
Wut'll git your dander riz ?
Come, I'll tell ye wut I'm thinkin'
Is our dooty in this fix,-
They'd ha' done 't ez quick ez winkin'
In the days o' seventy-six.
Clang the bells in every steeple;
Call all true men to disown
The tradoocers of our people,
The enslavers o' their own;
Let our dear old Bay State proudly
Put the trumpet to her mouth;
Let her ring this messidge loudly
In the ears of all the South:-
"I'll return ye good fer evil
Much ez we frail mortils can,
But I wun't go help the Devil
Makin' man the cus o' man;
Call me coward, call me traiter,
Jest ez suits your mean idees,-
Here I stand a tyrant-hater,
An' the friend o' God an' Peace! "
Ef I'd my way, I hed ruther
We should go to work an' part,
They take one way, we take t'other,-
Guess it wouldn't break my heart:
Man hed ough' to put asunder
Them thet God has noways jined;
An' I shouldn't gretly wonder
Ef there's thousands o' my mind.


## p. 9254 (#270) ###########################################

9254
JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL
G
WHAT MR. ROBINSON THINKS
UVENER B. is a sensible man;
He stays to his home an' looks arter his folks;
He draws his furrer ez straight ez he can,
An' into nobody's tater-patch pokes:
But John P.
Robinson he
Sez he wun't vote fer Guvener B.
My! ain't it terrible? Wut shall we du?
We can't never choose him, o' course,-thet's flat;
Guess we shall hev to come round, (don't you? )
An' go in fer thunder, an' guns, an' all that:
Fer John P.
Robinson he
Sez he wun't vote fer Guvener B.
Gineral C. is a dreffle smart man:
He's ben on all sides thet give places or pelf;
But consistency still wuz a part of his plan,—
He's ben true to one party, an' thet is himself:
So John P.
Robinson he
Sez he shall vote fer Gineral C.
Gineral C. he goes in fer the war;
He don't vally princerple more 'n an' old cud;
Wut did God make us raytional creeturs fer,
But glory an' gunpowder, plunder an' blood?
So John P.
Robinson he
Sez he shall vote fer Gineral C.
We were gittin' on nicely up here to our village
With good old idees o' wut's right an' wut ain't;
We kind o' thought Christ went agin war an' pillage,
An' thet eppyletts worn't the best mark of a saint:
But John P.
Robinson he
Sez this kind o' thing 's an exploded idee.
The side of our country must ollers be took,
An' Presidunt Polk, you know, he is our country;
An' the angel thet writes all our sins in a book
Puts the debit to him, an' to us the per contry:


## p. 9255 (#271) ###########################################

JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL
9255
An' John P.
Robinson he
Sez this is his view o' the thing to a T.
Parson Wilbur he calls all these argimunts lies;
Sez they're nothin' on airth but jest fee, faw, fum;
An' thet all this big talk of our destinies
Is half on it ign'ance, an' t'other half rum:
But John P.
Robinson he
Sez it ain't no sech thing; an' of course, so must we.
Parson Wilbur sez he never heerd in his life
Thet th' Apostles rigged out in their swaller-tail coats,
An' marched round in front of a drum an' a fife,
To git some on 'em office, an' some on 'em votes;
But John P.
Robinson he
Sez they didn't know everythin' down in Judee.
Wal, it's a marcy we've gut folks to tell us
The rights an' the wrongs o' these matters, I vow,—
God sends country lawyers, an' other wise fellers,
To start the world's team w'en it gits in a slough;
Fer John P.
Robinson he
Sez the world 'll go right ef he hollers out Gee!
THE COURTIN'
G
OD makes sech nights, all white an' still
Fur 'z you can look or listen;
Moonshine an' snow on field an' hill,
All silence an' all glisten.
Zekle crep' up quite unbeknown
An' peeked in thru' the winder,
An' there sot Huldy all alone,
'Ith no one nigh to hender.
A fireplace filled the room's one side
With half a cord o' wood in:
There warn't no stoves (tell comfort died)
To bake ye to a puddin'.


## p. 9256 (#272) ###########################################

9256
JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL
The wa'nut logs shot sparkles out
Towards the pootiest, bless her!
An' leetle flames danced all about
The chiny on the dresser.
Agin the chimbley crooknecks hung,
An' in amongst 'em rusted
The ole queen's-arm thet gran'ther Young
Fetched back f'om Concord-busted.
The very room, coz sh was in,
Seemed warm f'om floor to ceilin';
An' she looked full ez rosy agin
Ez the apples she was peelin'.
'Twas kin' o' kingdom-come to look
On sech a blessed cretur;
A dog-rose blushin' to a brook
Ain't modester nor sweeter.
He was six foot o' man, Ar;
Clear grit an' human natur';
None couldn't quicker pitch a ton
Nor dror a furrer straighter.
He'd sparked it with full twenty gals,
Hed squired 'em, danced 'em, druv 'em,-
Fust this one, an' then thet, by spells,—
All is, he couldn't love 'em.
But long o' her his veins 'ould run
All crinkly like curled maple;
The side she breshed felt full o' sun
Ez a south slope in Ap'il.
She thought no v'ice hed sech a swing
Ez hisn in the choir;
My! when he made 'Ole Hunderd' ring,
She knowed the Lord was nigher.
An' she'd blush scarlit, right in prayer,
When her new meetin'-bunnet
Felt somehow thru its crown a pair
O' blue eyes sot upun it.
Thet night, I tell ye, she looked some!
She seemed to 've gut a new soul;


## p. 9257 (#273) ###########################################

JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL
9257
For she felt sartin-sure he'd come,
Down to her very shoe-sole.
She heered a foot, an' knowed it tu,
A-raspin' on the scraper:
All ways to once her feelin's flew
Like sparks in burnt-up paper.
He kin' o' l'itered on the mat,
Some doubtfle o' the sekle;
His heart kep' goin' pity-pat,
But hern went pity Zekle.
An' yit she gin her cheer a jerk
Ez though she wished him furder,
An' on her apples kep' to work.
Parin' away like murder.
"You want to see my Pa, I s'pose? "
"Wal-
no-I come dasignin'"-
"To see my Ma? She's sprinklin' clo'es
Agin to-morrer's i'nin'. "
――
To say why gals acts so or so,
Or don't, 'ould be persumin :
Mebby to mean yes an' say no
Comes nateral to women.
He stood a spell on one foot fust,
Then stood a spell on t' other;
An' on which one he felt the wust
He couldn't ha' told ye nuther.
Says he, "I'd better call agin; "
Says she, "Think likely, Mister:"
Thet last word pricked him like a pin,
An' Wal, he up an' kist her.
―
When Ma bimeby upon 'em slips,
Huldy sot pale ez ashes,
All kin' o' smily roun' the lips
An' teary roun' the lashes.
For she was jes' the quiet kind
Whose naturs never vary,
Like streams that keep a summer mind
Snow-hid in Jenooary.


## p. 9258 (#274) ###########################################

9258
JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL
The blood clost roun' her heart felt glued
Too tight for all expressin',
Tell mother see how metters stood,
An' gin 'em both her blessin'.
Then her red come back like the tide
Down to the Bay o' Fundy;
An' all I know is, they was cried
In meetin' come nex' Sunday.
MR. HOSEA BIGLOW TO THE EDITOR OF THE ATLAN-
TIC MONTHLY
EAR SIR,-Your letter come to han'
D Requestin' me to please be funny;
But I ain't made upon a plan
Thet knows wut's comin', gall or honey:
Ther's times the world doos look so queer,
Odd fancies come afore I call 'em;
An' then agin, for half a year,
No preacher 'thout a call 's more solemn.
You're 'n want o' sunthin' light an' cute,
Rattlin' an' shrewd an' kin' o' jingleish,
An' wish, pervidin' it 'ould suit,
I'd take an' citify my English.
I ken write long-tailed, ef I please,-
But when I'm jokin', no, I thankee:
Then, 'fore I know it, my idees
Run helter-skelter into Yankee.
Sence I begun to scribble rhyme,
I tell ye wut, I hain't ben foolin';
The parson's books, life, death, an' time
Hev took some trouble with my schoolin':
Nor th' airth don't git put out with me,
Thet love her 'z though she wuz a woman;
Why, th' ain't a bird upon the tree
But half forgives my bein' human.
An' yit I love th' unhighschooled way
Ol' farmers hed when I wuz younger:
Their talk wuz meatier, an' 'ould stay,
While book froth seems to whet your hunger;


## p. 9259 (#275) ###########################################

JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL
9259
For puttin' in a downright lick
'Twixt Humbug's eyes, ther's few can metch it;
An' then it helves my thoughts ez slick
Ez stret-grained hickory doos a hetchet.
But when I can't, I can't, thet's all;
For Natur' won't put up with gullin';
Idees you hev to shove an' haul
Like a druv pig, ain't wuth a mullein:
Live thoughts ain't sent for; thru all rifts
O' sense they pour an' resh ye onwards,
Like rivers when south-lyin' drifts
Feel thet th' old airth's a-wheelin' sunwards.
Time wuz, the rhymes come crowdin' thick
Ez office-seekers arter 'lection,
An' into ary place 'ould stick
Without no bother nor objection:
But since the war my thoughts hang back
Ez though I wanted to enlist 'em,
An' subs'tutes, - they don't never lack,
But then they'll slope afore you've mist 'em.
Nothin' don't seem like wut it wuz;
I can't see wut there is to hender,
An' yit my brains jes' go buzz, buzz,
Like bumblebees agin a winder:
'Fore these times come, in all airth's row,
Ther' wuz one quiet place, my head in,
Where I could hide an' think-but now
It's all one teeter, hopin', dreadin'.
Where's Peace? I start, some clear-blown night,
When gaunt stone walls grow numb an' number,
An', creakin' 'cross the snow-crus' white,
Walk the col' starlight into summer;
Up grows the moon, an' swell by swell
Thru the pale pasturs silvers dimmer
Than the last smile thet strives to tell
O' love gone heavenward in its shimmer.
I hev been gladder o' sech things
Than cocks o' spring or bees o' clover:
They filled my heart with livin' springs,
But now they seem to freeze 'em over;


## p. 9260 (#276) ###########################################

9260
JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL
Sights innercent ez babes on knee,
Peaceful ez eyes o' pastur'd cattle,
Jes' coz they be so, seem to me
To rile me more with thoughts o' battle.
In-doors an' out by spells I try:
Ma'am Natur' keeps her spin-wheel goin',
But leaves my natur' stiff and dry
Ez fiel's o' clover arter mowin';
An' her jes' keepin' on the same,
Calmer 'n a clock, an' never carin',
An' findin' nary thing to blame,
Is wus than ef she took to swearin'.
Snowflakes come whisperin' on the pane
The charm makes blazin' logs so pleasant;
But I can't hark to wut they're say'n',
With Grant or Sherman ollers present:
The chimbleys shudder in the gale,
Thet lulls, then suddin takes to flappin'
Like a shot hawk; but all's ez stale
To me ez so much sperit-rappin'.
Under the yaller-pines I house,
When sunshine makes 'em all sweet-scented,
An' hear among their furry boughs
The baskin' west wind purr contented;
While 'way o'erhead, ez sweet an' low
Ez distant bells thet ring for meetin',
The wedged wil' geese their bugles blow,
Further an' further south retreatin'.
Or up the slippery knob I strain
An' see a hundred hills like islan's
Lift their blue woods in broken chain
Out o' the sea o' snowy silence;
The farm smokes - sweetes' sight on airth
Slow thru the winter air a-shrinkin',
Seem kin' o' sad, an' roun' the hearth
Of empty places set me thinkin'.
Beaver roars hoarse with meltin' snows,
An' rattles di'mon's from his granite:
Time wuz, he snatched away my prose,
An' into psalms or satires ran it;


## p. 9261 (#277) ###########################################

JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL
9261
But he, nor all the rest thet once
Started my blood to country-dances,
Can't set me goin' more'n a dunce
Thet hain't no use for dreams an' fancies.
Rat-tat-tat-tattle thru the street
I hear the drummers makin' riot,
An' I set thinkin' o' the feet
Thet follered once an' now are quiet;
White feet ez snowdrops innercent,
Thet never knowed the paths o' Satan,
Whose comin' step ther's ears thet won't,
No, not lifelong, leave off awaitin'.
Why, hain't I held 'em on my knee?
Didn't I love to see 'em growin',-
Three likely lads ez wal could be,
Hahnsome an' brave an' not tu knowin'?
I set an' look into the blaze
Whose natur', jes' like theirn, keeps climbin'
Ez long 'z it lives, in shinin' ways,
An' half despise myself for rhymin'.
Wut's words to them whose faith an' truth
On War's red techstone rang true metal,
Who ventered life an' love an' youth
For the gret prize o' death in battle?
To him who, deadly hurt, agen
Flashed on afore the charge's thunder,
Tippin' with fire the bolt of men
Thet rived the Rebel line asunder?
"Tain't right to hev the young go fust,
All throbbin' full o' gifts an' graces,
Leavin' life's paupers dry ez dust
To try an' make b'lieve fill their places:
Nothin' but tells us wut we miss;
Ther's gaps our lives can't never fay in;
An' thet world seems so fur from this
Lef' for us loafers to grow gray in!
My eyes cloud up for rain; my mouth
Will take to twitchin' roun' the corners:
I pity mothers, tu, down South,
For all they sot among the scorners;


## p. 9262 (#278) ###########################################

9262
JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL
I'd sooner take my chance to stan'
At Jedgment where your meanest slave is,
Than at God's bar hol' up a han'
Ez drippin' red ez yourn, Jeff Davis!
Come, Peace! not like a mourner bowed
For honor lost an' dear ones wasted,
But proud, to meet a people proud,
With eyes that tell o' triumph tasted!
Come, with han' grippin' on the hilt,
An' step thet proves ye Victory's daughter!
Longin' for you, our sperits wilt
Like shipwrecked men's on raf's for water.
Come, while our country feels the lift
Of a gret instinct shoutin' "Forwards! "
An' knows thet freedom ain't a gift
Thet tarries long in han's o' cowards!
Come, sech ez mothers prayed for, when
They kissed their cross with lips thet quivered,
An' bring fair wages for brave men,
A nation saved, a race delivered!
THE WASHERS OF THE SHROUD
LONG a river-side, I know not where,
A I walked one night in mystery of dream;
A chill creeps curdling yet beneath my hair,
To think what chanced me by the pallid gleam
Of a moon-wraith that waned through haunted air.
Pale fireflies pulsed within the meadow-mist
Their halos, wavering thistle-downs of light;
The loon, that seemed to mock some goblin tryst,
Laughed; and the echoes, huddling in affright,
Like Odin's hounds, fled baying down the night.
Then all was silent, till there smote my ear
A movement in the stream that checked my breath:
Was it the slow plash of a wading deer?
But something said, "This water is of Death!
The Sisters wash a shroud,-ill thing to hear! ”
I, looking then, beheld the ancient Three
Known to the Greek's and to the Northman's creed,


## p. 9263 (#279) ###########################################

JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL
9263
That sit in shadow of the mystic Tree,
Still crooning, as they weave their endless brede,
One song: "Time was, Time is, and Time shall be. "
No wrinkled crones were they, as I had deemed,
But fair as yesterday, to-day, to-morrow,
To mourner, lover, poet, ever seemed;
Something too high for joy, too deep for sorrow,
Thrilled in their tones, and from their faces gleamed.
"Still men and nations reap as they have strawn,”
So sang they, working at their task the while;
"The fatal raiment must be cleansed ere dawn:
-
For Austria? Italy? the Sea-Queen's isle?
O'er what quenched grandeur must our shroud be drawn?
"Or is it for a younger, fairer corse,
That gathered States like children round his knees,
That tamed the wave to be his posting-horse,
Feller of forests, linker of the seas,
Bridge-builder, hammerer, youngest son of Thor's?
"What make we, murmur'st thou? and what are we?
When empires must be wound, we bring the shroud,
The time-old web of the implacable Three:
Is it too coarse for him, the young and proud?
Earth's mightiest deigned to wear it,-why not he? "
"Is there no hope? " I moaned, "so strong, so fair!
Our Fowler whose proud bird would brook erewhile
No rival's swoop in all our western air!
Gather the ravens, then, in funeral file
For him, life's morn yet golden in his hair?
"Leave me not hopeless, ye unpitying dames!
I see, half seeing. Tell me, ye who scanned
The stars, Earth's elders, still must noblest aims
Be traced upon oblivious ocean sands?
Must Hesper join the wailing ghosts of names? "
"When grass blades stiffen with red battle dew,
Ye deem we choose the victor and the slain:
Say, choose we them that shall be leal and true
To the heart's longing, the high faith of brain?
Yet there the victory lies, if ye but knew.
"Three roots bear up Dominion: Knowledge, Will,—
These twain are strong, but stronger yet the third,—


## p. 9264 (#280) ###########################################

9264
JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL
Obedience,-'tis the great tap-root that still,
Knit round the rock of Duty, is not stirred,
Though Heaven-loosed tempests spend their utmost skill.
"Is the doom sealed for Hesper? 'Tis not we
Denounce it, but the Law before all time:
The brave makes danger opportunity;
The waverer, paltering with the chance sublime,
Dwarfs it to peril: which shall Hesper be?
"Hath he let vultures climb his eagle's seat
To make Jove's bolts purveyors of their maw?
Hath he the Many's plaudits found more sweet
Than Wisdom? held Opinion's wind for Law?
Then let him hearken for the doomster's feet!
"Rough are the steps, slow-hewn in flintiest rock,
States climb to power by; slippery those with gold
Down which they stumble to eternal mock:
No chafferer's hand shall long the sceptre hold,
Who, given a Fate to shape, would sell the block.
"We sing old Sagas, songs of weal and woe,
Mystic because too cheaply understood;
Dark sayings are not ours; men hear and know,
See Evil weak, see strength alone in Good,
Yet hope to stem God's fire with walls of tow.
"Time Was unlocks the riddle of Time Is,
That offers choice of glory or of gloom;
The solver makes Time Shall Be surely his.
But hasten, Sisters! for even now the tomb
Grates its slow hinge and calls from the abyss. "
"But not for him," I cried,-"not yet for him
Whose large horizon, westering, star by star
Wins from the void to where on Ocean's rim
The sunset shuts the world with golden bar,—
Not yet his thews shall fail, his eye grow dim!
"His shall be larger manhood, saved for those
That walk unblenching through the trial fires;
Not suffering, but faint heart, is worst of woes,
And he no base-born son of craven sires,
Whose eye need blench confronted with his foes.
"Tears may be ours, but proud, for those who win
Death's royal purple in the foeman's lines;


## p. 9265 (#281) ###########################################

JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL
9265
Peace, too, brings tears; and 'mid the battle din,
The wiser ear some text of God divines,—
For the sheathed blade may rust with darker sin.
"God, give us peace! not such as lulls to sleep,
But sword on thigh, and brow with purpose knit!
And let our Ship of State to harbor sweep,
Her ports all up, her battle lanterns lit,
And her leashed thunders gathering for their leap! "
So cried I with clenched hands and passionate pain,
Thinking of dear ones by Potomac's side;
Again the loon laughed mocking, and again
The echoes bayed far down the night and died,
While waking I recalled my wandering brain.
B
XVI-580
MEMORIÆ POSITUM
I
ENEATH the trees,
My lifelong friends in this dear spot,
Sad now for eyes that see them not,
I hear the autumnal breeze
Wake the dry leaves to sigh for gladness gone,
Whispering vague omens of oblivion;
Hear, restless as the seas,
Time's grim feet rustling through the withered grace
Of many a spreading realm and strong-stemmed race,
Even as my own through these.
Why make we moan
For loss that doth enrich us yet
With upward yearnings of regret?
Bleaker than unmossed stone
Our lives were but for this immortal gain
Of unstilled longing and inspiring pain!
As thrills of long-hushed tone
Live in the viol, so our souls grow fine
With keen vibrations from the touch divine
Of noble natures gone.
'Twere indiscreet
To vex the shy and sacred grief
With harsh obtrusions of relief;
Yet Verse, with noiseless feet,


## p. 9266 (#282) ###########################################

9266
JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL
Go whisper: "This death hath far choicer ends
Than slowly to impearl in hearts of friends;
These obsequies 'tis meet
Not to seclude in closets of the heart,
But, church-like, with wide doorways, to impart
Even to the heedless street. "
II
Brave, good, and true,
I see him stand before me now,
And read again on that young brow,
Where every hope was new,
How sweet were life! Yet, by the mouth firm-set,
And look made up for Duty's utmost debt,
I could divine he knew
That death within the sulphurous hostile lines,
In the mere wreck of nobly pitched designs,
Plucks heart's-ease, and not rue.
Happy their end
Who vanish down life's evening stream
Placid as swans that drift in dream
Round the next river-bend!
Happy long life, with honor at the close,
Friends' painless tears, the softened thought of foes!
And yet, like him, to spend
All at a gush, keeping our first faith sure
From mid-life's doubt and eld's contentment poor,--
What more could Fortune send?
Right in the van,
On the red rampart's slippery swell,
With heart that beat a charge, he fell
Foeward, as fits a man;
But the high soul burns on to light men's feet
Where death for noble ends makes dying sweet;
His life her crescent's span
Orbs full with share in their undarkening days
Who ever climbed the battailous steeps of praise
Since valor's praise began.
III
His life's expense
Hath won him coeternal youth
With the immaculate prime of Truth;
While we, who make pretense


## p. 9267 (#283) ###########################################

JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL
9267
At living on, and wake and eat and sleep,
And life's stale trick by repetition keep,—
Our fickle permanence
(A poor leaf-shadow on a brook, whose play
Of busy idlesse ceases with our day)
Is the mere cheat of sense.
We bide our chance,
Unhappy, and make terms with Fate
A little more to let us wait;
He leads for aye the advance,
Hope's forlorn-hopes that plant the desperate good
For nobler earths and days of manlier mood;
Our wall of circumstance
Cleared at a bound, he flashes o'er the fight,
A saintly shape of fame, to cheer the right
And steel each wavering glance.
I write of one,
While with dim eyes I think of three;
Who weeps not others fair and brave as he?
Ah, when the fight is won,
Dear Land, whom triflers now make bold to scorn
(Thee! from whose forehead earth awaits her morn),
How nobler shall the sun
Flame in thy sky, how braver breathe thy air,
That thou bred'st children who for thee could dare
And die as thine have done!
[The foregoing poems are copyrighted, and are reprinted by permission of
Houghton, Mifflin & Co. , publishers. ]
UNCLE ZEB
From A Moosehead Journal': Literary Essays. Copyright 1864, 1871, 1876,
1890, by James Russell Lowell. Reprinted by permission of Houghton,
Mifflin & Co. , publishers.
A
STRING of five loons was flying back and forth in long, irreg-
ular zigzags, uttering at intervals their wild, tremulous cry,
which always seems far away, like the last faint pulse of
echo dying among the hills, and which is one of those few sounds
that instead of disturbing solitude, only deepen and confirm it.
On our inland ponds they are usually seen in pairs, and I asked
if it were common to meet five together. My question was an-
swered by a queer-looking old man, chiefly remarkable for a pair


## p. 9268 (#284) ###########################################

9268
JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL
of enormous cowhide boots, over which large blue trousers of
frocking strove in vain to crowd themselves.
"Wahl, 'tain't ushil," said he, "and it's called a sign o' rain
comin', that is. "
"Do you think it will rain ? »
With the caution of a veteran auspex, he evaded a direct re-
ply. "Wahl, they du say it's a sign o' rain comin'," said he.