specifically of "Sir Launfal" when he wrote this. It is more likely that he would have named "Prometheus," "Columbus," or "Freedom" if he had been asked to name names; and yet it is not straining language too far to say that when he took up an Arthurian story he had a different attitude toward the whole cycle of legends from that of Tennyson who, a half dozen years before, had begun to revive the legends for the pleasure of English-reading people. The exuberance of the poet as he carols of June in the prelude to Part First is an expression of the joyous spring which was in the veins of the young American, glad in the sense of freedom and hope. As Tennyson threw into his retelling of Arthurian romance a moral sense, so Lowell, also a moralist in his poetic apprehension, made a parable of his tale, and, in the broadest interpretation of democracy, sang of the levelling of all ranks in a common divine humanity. There is a subterranean passage connecting the "Biglow Papers" with "Sir Launfal"; it is the holy zeal which attacks slavery issuing in this fable of a beautiful charity, Christ in the guise of a beggar.

The invention is a very simple one, and appears to have been suggested by Tennyson's "Sir Galahad," but the verses in the poem which linger longest in the mind are not those connected with the fable, but rather the full-throated burst of song in praise of June. Indeed, one might seriously maintain from Lowell's verse that there was an especial affinity which he held with this month. Witness the joyous rush of pleasure with which "Under

the Willows" is begun, and the light-heartedness with which Hosea Biglow leaves the half-catalogue manner rehearsing the movement of Spring in "Sunthin' in the Pastoral Line," and leaps almost vociferously into the warm, generous air of June, when "all comes crowdin' in." The poem entitled "Al Fresco" is but a variation on the same theme; when he first published it, save the opening stanza, in the Anti-Slavery Standard, he gave it the title of "A Day in June." And when, compelled to lie indoors, he found a compensation in Calderon singing to him like a nightingale, it was still a wistful look he cast on his catbird that joined with the oriole and the cuckoo to call him out of doors, and he sighed to think that he could not like them be a pipe for June to play on. "The Nightingale in the Study" was written when he sought in illness for something that would seclude him from himself; but the three poems of 1848 were the outcome of a nature so tingling with vitality that expression was its necessity, and spontaneity the law of its being. Literature, freedom, and nature in turn appealed to the young enthusiast; the visions he saw stirred him, in the quiet of Elmwood, to eager, impetuous delivery; and his natural voice was a singing one.

1 He intended first to call this "A June Idyll."

CHAPTER VI

SIX YEARS

1845-1851

WHEN, in the spring of 1845, the Lowells returned to Cambridge from Philadelphia, where they had spent the first four months of their married life, it was to share the family home of Elmwood for the next six years. Lowell's father retired in the summer of 1845 from active charge of the West Parish in Boston, but retained his interest in various societies which gave him partial occupation, leaving him leisure for the indulgence of his taste for reading and for the pleasures of gardening and small farming. His mother, whose malady slowly but steadily increased, was under watchful care. She was taken to various health resorts in hopes of recovery, and spent a part of her last years under more constant treatment at an asylum for the mentally deranged. Miss Rebecca Lowell had charge of the little household, and now and then went on journeys with her father or mother or both, leaving the young couple to themselves. As one child after another came into the circle, the grandfather found a solace for the sorrow which lay heavily upon him, and his letters, when he was on one of his journeys, were filled with affectionate messages for his

new daughter and her children, mingled with careful charges to his son concerning the well-being of the cattle, small and large, and the proper harvesting of the little crops.

Mrs. Lowell's family lived near by in Watertown, and one by one her sisters married, one of them coming to Cambridge to live. The society of the college town was open, and it was in these early years that Lowell formed one of a whist club, which, with but slight variation in membership, continued its meetings to the end of his life, and the simple records of which were kept by Lowell. Its most constant members were Mr. John Holmes, a younger brother of Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes, Mr. John Bartlett, who was for a while a bookseller in Cambridge, and afterward until his retirement a member of the publishing firm of Little, Brown & Co. of Boston, and best known by his handbook of "Familiar Quotations and his elaborate "Concordance to Shakespeare," and finally Dr. Estes Howe, who married Mrs. Lowell's sister.

Lowell was much given to concealing in his verse or prose little allusions which might be passed over by readers unaware of what lay beneath, but would be taken as a whispered aside by his friends. Thus in a "Preliminary Note to the Second Edition" of "A Fable for Critics," he says: "I can walk with the Doctor, get facts from the Don, or draw out the Lambish quintessence of John, and feel nothing more than a half comic sorrow, to think that they all1 will be lying to

1 That is, the hostile criticisms of his book.

morrow tossed carelessly up on the waste-paper shelves, and forgotten by all but their half dozen selves."

In the summer of 1846 the sickness of little Blanche took the family suddenly to Stockbridge in the Berkshire Hills, whence Lowell wrote to Carter: "Stockbridge is without exception the quietest place I was ever in, and the office of postmaster here one of the most congenial to my taste and habits of any I ever saw or heard of. The postmaster has no regular hours whatever. Even if engaged in sorting the mail, he will run out and lock the door behind him, to play with his grandchildren. I do not believe that in the cabinet of any postmaster-general there is a more unique specimen. He is a gray-bearded old gentleman of between sixty and seventy, wears the loose calico gown so much in vogue among the country clergy, and feels continually that he is an important limb of the great body politic. I do not mean that he is vain. There is too profound a responsibility attached to his office to allow of so light and unworthy a passion. There is a solemn, halfmelancholy grandeur about him, a foreboding, perchance, of that change of administration which may lop him from the parent tree, a Montezuma-like dread of that mysterious stranger into whose hands his sceptre must pass. In purchasing a couple of steel pens or a few cigars of him (for he keeps a small variety store) you feel that the parcel is done up and handed over the counter by one of the potent hands of government itself. . . . We have