The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell

furnish the material for the next Democratic platform in the presidential campaign of 1868. Page 234. Tyler.

John Tyler, who had been chosen Vice-President in 1840, succeeded to the Presidency on the death of Harrison one month after the inauguration. He abandoned the policy of the party that elected him, and provoked just such a contest with it as Johnson did.

Page 300. AN INVITATION.

[Lowell entered this poem in his several editions as addressed to J. F. H., initials which meant nothing to the general public, but recalled to the contemporaries of his college days a Virginian gentleman, a graduate of Harvard of the class of 1840, greatly endeared by his temper and gifts to his early associates and especially to Lowell. Not long after his graduation he went to Germany to study; he disappeared from sight, turning up at odd times in odd places. He did much various study and had much varied experience. After many years he returned home. When the war broke out he joined the Confederate army as a surgeon, and died worn out with hard service in 1862.]

Page 308. AFTER THE BURIAL.

["To show you that I am not unable to go along with you in the feeling expressed in your letter, I will copy a few verses out of my common-place book.

Yes, faith is a goodly anchor

When the skies are blue and clear;
At the bows it hangs right stalwart
With a sturdy iron cheer.

But when the ship goes to pieces,

And the tempests are all let loose,
It rushes plumb down to the sea-depths,
'Mid slimy sea-weed and ooze.

Better then one spar of memory,
One broken plank of the past,
For our human hearts to cling to,
Adrift in the whirling vast.

To the spirit the cross of the spirit,
To the flesh its blind despair,
Clutching fast the thin-worn locket

With its threads of gossamer hair.

O friend! thou reasonest bravely,
Thy preaching is wise and true;
But the earth that stops my darling's ears
Makes mine insensate, too.

That little shoe in the corner,

So worn and wrinkled and brown,
With its emptiness confutes you,

And argues your wisdom down.

"But enough, dear Sydney, of death and sorrow. They are not subjects which I think it profitable or wise to talk about, think about, or write about often. Death is a private tutor. We have no fellow-scholars, and must lay our lessons to heart alone." Lowell to Sydney Howard Gay, March 17, 1850.]

Page 350. THE CATHEDRAL.

I am something of a purist, though I like best the word that best says the thing. (You know I have studied lingo a little.) I am fifty-one years old, however, and have in one sense won my spurs. I claim the right now and then to knight a plebeian word for good service in the field. But it will almost always turn out that it has after all good blood in its veins, and can prove its claim to be put in the saddle. Rote is a familiar word all along our seaboard to express that dull and continuous burden of the sea heard inland before or after a great storm. The root of the word may be in rumpere, but it is more likely in rotare, from the identity of this sea-music with that of the rote a kind of hurdy-gurdy with which the jongleurs accompanied their song. It is one of those Elizabethan words which we New-Englanders have preserved along with so many others. It occurs in the Mirror for Magistrates,' 'the sea's rote,' which Nares, not understanding, would change to rore! It is not to be found in any provincial glossary, but I caught it alive at Beverly and the Isles of Shoals. Like 'mobbled queen,' 't is 'good.'

"Whiff Ruskin calls an American elevation of English lower word.' Not a bit of it. I have always thought the whiff and wind of his fell sword' in Hamlet' rather fine than otherwise. Ben also has the word. Downshod means shod with down. I doubted about this word myself - but I wanted it. As to misgave, the older poets used it as an active verb, and I have done with it as all poets do with language. My meaning is clear, and that is the main point. His objection to spumesliding down the baffled decuman' I do not understand. I think if he will read over his 'ridiculous Germanism' (p. 13 seq.) with the context he will see that he has misunderstood me. (By the way, in our life alone doth Nature live' is Coleridge's, not Wordsworth's.) I never hesitate to say anything I have honestly felt because some one may have said it before, for it will always get a new color from the new mind, but here I was not saying the same thing by a great deal. Nihil in intellectu quod non prius in sensu would be nearer though not what I meant. Nature (inanimate), which is the image of the mind, sympathizes with all our moods. I would have numbered the lines as Ruskin suggests, only it looks as if one valued them too much. That sort of thing should be posthumous. You may do it for me, my dear Charles, if my poems survive me. Two dropt stitches I must take up which I notice on looking over what I have written. Ruskin surely remembers Carlyle's whiff of grape-shot.' That is one. The other is that rote may quite as well be from the Icelandic at hriota to snore; but my studies more and more persuade me that where there is in Englisn a Teutonic and a Romance root meaning the same thing, the two are apt to melt into each other so as to make it hard to say from which our word comes." Letters II., pp.

["Now for Ruskin's criticisms. As to words, | 65-67.]

LEGATION OF THE UNITED States, LONDON, September 4, 1881. Dear Mr. Gilder, Your telegram scared me, for, coming at an unusual hour, I thought it brought ill news from Washington. My relief on finding it innocent has perhaps made me too good-natured towards the verses I send you, but I have waited sixty-two years for them, and am willing to wait as many more (not here) before they are printed. Do what you like with them. They mean only my hearty good-will towards you and my hope for your success in your new undertaking.

Faithfully yours, J. R. LOWELL.

If I could see the proofs, very likely I could better it-they sober one and bring one to his bearings. Perhaps the metaphysical (or whatever they are) stanzas- - what I mean is moralizing - were better away. Perhaps too many compound epithets - but I had to give up visionary in order to save legendary, which was essential. Perhaps a note, saying that so long as the author can remember, a pair of these birds (give ornithological name muscicapa ?) have built on jutting brick in an archway leading to the house at Elmwood - or does everybody know what a phoebe is? I am so old that I am accustomed to people's being ignorant of whatever you please.

PHOEBE

Ere pales in heaven the morning star,
A bird, the loneliest of its kind,
Hears Dawn's faint footfall from afar
While all its mates are dumb and blind.

It is a wee sad-colored thing,

As shy and secret as a maid, That, ere in choir the robins ring, Pipes its own name like one afraid.

It seems pain-prompted to repeat
The story of some ancient ill,
But Phoebe Phabe! sadly sweet
Is all it says, and then is still.

It calls and listens. Earth and sky,
Hushed by the pathos of its fate,
Listen, breath held, but no reply
Comes from its doom-divided mate.

Phabe it calls and calls again,

And Ovid, could he but have heard,
Had hung a legendary pain
About the memory of the bird;

A pain articulate so long

In penance of some mouldered crime Whose ghost still flies the Furies' thong Down the waste solitudes of Time;

Or walf from young Earth's wonder-hour When gods found mortal maidens fair, And will malign was joined with power Love's kindly laws to overbear.

Phabe is all it has to say

In plaintive cadence o'er and o'er,
Like children that have lost their way
And know their names, but nothing more.

Is it a type, since nature's lyre
Vibrates to every note in man,
Of that insatiable desire,

Meant to be so, since life began ?

Or a fledged satire, sent to rasp
Their jaded sense, who, tired so soon
With shifting life's doll-dresses, grasp,
Gray-bearded babies, at the moon?

I, in strange lands at gray of dawn
Wakeful, have heard that fruitless plaint
Through Memory's chambers deep withdrawn
Renew its iterations faint.

A CHRONOLOGICAL LIST OF MR. LOWELL'S POEMS 481

TO THE SAME.

LEGATION OF THE UNITED STATES,
LONDON, September 8, 1881.

Dear Mr. Gilder, - This is positively the last! I wish to omit the stanza beginning "Or a winged satire," etc. I have been convinced by a friend whom I have consulted that it was a cuckoo's egg in my nest. Item. The verse that bothered me most of all was this:

Listen, breath held, but no reply, etc.

I wished to have a distinct pause after "listen," in accordance with the sense. Somehow I could not get the right, and "breath held" was clearly the wrong one, awkward, and with the same vowel sound in both halves. PrintListen no whisper of reply

Is heard of doom-dissevered mate.

No; that won't do, either, with its assonance of heard" and "dissevered ". so, though I prefer "dissevered" for sense, I will go back to the original word "divided," which I suppose was instinctive.

This is positively my last dying speech and confession. You need fear nothing more from me. I fancy you ducking your head for fear of another rap every time the postman comes.

I hope you will like my little poem, and tell me so if you don't. Kindest regards to Mrs. Gilder. Faithfully yours,

J. R. LOWELL.

LEGATION OF THE UNITED STATES,

LONDON, September 12, 1881.

As I am writing, I add that if you think

(as I am half inclined)

HOTEL DANIELI, VENICE, October 24, 1881. Thank you for the printed copy. Of course I am disgusted with it. Print somehow is like a staring plaster-cast compared with the soft and flowing outlines, the modest nudity of the manuscript clay. But it is a real pleasure to me that you like it.

"Robins ring" is right, and whenever you spend a June night at Elmwood (as I hope you will so soon as I am safe there once more) you will recognize its truth. There are hundreds of 'em going at once, like the bells here last night (Sunday), with a perfect indecency of disregard for rhythm or each other. Mr. Burroughs, I hear, has been criticising my knowledge of out-doors. God bless his soul! I had been living in the country thirty years (I fancy

it must be) before he was born, and if anybody ever lived in the open air it was I. So be at peace. By the way, I took Progne merely because she was changed into a little bird. should have preferred a male, and was thinking of a fellow (transformed, I think by Medea), but can't remember his name. While I am about it I question "wee." Is it English? I had no dictionary at hand. But there is one atrocity-"moldered." Why do you give in to these absurdities? Why abscond in to this petty creek from the great English main of orthography? 'Tis not quite so bad as "I don't know as" for "I don't know that," but grazes it and is of a piece with putting one's knife in one's mouth.]

A Parable (Worn and footsore was the
Prophet).

Song (O moonlight deep and tender).
Sonnet (Beloved, in the noisy city here).
Sonnets: On Reading Wordsworth's Son-
nets in Defence of Capital Punishment.
(Six sonnets.)

Sonnet: To M. O. S.

Sonnet (Our love is not a fading earthly flower).

The Shepherd of King Admetus.

An Incident in a Railroad Car.

Elegy on the Death of Dr. Channing.

1843. The Fountain.

The Fatherland.

Sonnet: In Absence.

Sonnet: The Street.

A Legend of Brittany.

Prometheus.