CHAPTER IV

PUBLIC MAN AND CRITIC

1861-1876

1. Lowell and the War of the Rebellion. WRITING to Thomas Hughes in September, 1859, Lowell speaks, not without a certain complacency, of twelve years of cloistered studies that have alienated him very much from contemporary politics. The alienation, however, was more fanciful than real; with all his business of teaching and editing, with all his long wandering in bookish realms of gold, with all his jocund hours of friendly fellowship, he had never ceased to brood over the issues of national righteousness. If, for a time, the poet-militant in him seemed to slumber, deep was the passion of that sleep, and when he awakened to the drums and trampling of civil war it was to chant his noblest

measures.

His growth in these years of "cloistered studies" exemplified precisely the course foreshadowed in that "L'Envoi: To the Muse" which he wrote in 1859. He had in earlier years

followed the flying feet of the Muse through the lovely ways of Nature; his young ear had heard her fresh music blown through

"Mountains, forests, open downs,

Lakes, railroads, prairies, states, and towns;"

he had felt her "rhythmic presence fleet and rare," in Senate-hall and court, —

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Making the Mob a moment fine

With glimpses of their own Divine;"

above all he had felt her graciousness at home,

"With that sweet serious undertone
Of duty, music all her own."

Now he was to fulfill the Muse's behest,

"The epic of a man rehearse,

Be something better than thy verse."

So in losing himself, he was, poetically, to find himself.

In August, 1859, Mr. Phillips, of the firm of Phillips and Sampson, died, and soon after the business went into the hands of an assignee. A few months later some of the more important copyrights of Phillips, Sampson and Company, and the "Atlantic Monthly" were bought by the distinguished publishing house of Ticknor and Fields. Lowell continued for a time in the editorial chair, but in the course of a couple of

years it seemed better to the owners that Mr. Fields, who was peculiarly qualified for the post by his intimate relation to the best writers of the day, should assume the editorship in person. In May, 1861, Lowell gave up the position with cheerful regret.

"I wish you all joy of your worm," he wrote to Fields. "You will find it no bad apprenticeship or prelude for that warmer and more congenial world to which all successful publishers are believed by devout authors to go. I was going to say I was glad to be rid of my old man of the sea. But I don't believe I am. I doubt if we see the finger of Providence so readily in the stoppage of salary as in its beginning or increment. . . . I wish to say in black and white that I am perfectly satisfied with the arrangements you have made. You will be surprised before long to find how easily you get on without me, and wonder that you ever thought me a necessity. It is amazing how quickly the waters close over one. He carries down with him the memory of his splash and struggle, and fancies it is still going on when the last bubble even has burst long ago."1

Lowell continued to be a regular contributor to the "Atlantic" in verse and prose until 1864. In January, 1864, he began to edit the “North 1 Letters, vol. ii, pp. 58, 59.

American Review," jointly with Mr. Norton; thenceforward most of his literary and political papers appeared in this journal. In those days the "North American" was a Boston quarterly of a prodigious gravity. The new editors gave it fresh distinction and readableness. Mr. Norton was the active editor, and the new editorial connection was chiefly momentous to Lowell in still further solidifying his position as a public man, and in affording him a vehicle for literary essays of a scope and amplitude that even the "Atlantic" would have found "unmagazinable," as the slang of editorial offices puts it.

His own life at Elmwood flowed in the old equable course, though its waters ran deep, and, for all the rippling play of humor on the surface, were fed from bitter springs. Three of his nephews, Charles Russell Lowell, James Jackson Lowell, and William Lowell Putnam, went to the war. Lieutenant Putnam was killed in the front of battle at Ball's Bluff in October, 1861; Lieutenant James Jackson Lowell was mortally wounded at Glendale, Virginia, in June, 1862; and Charles Russell Lowell, who rose to the rank of Brigadier General, died in October, 1864, from wounds received at the battle of Cedar Creek. No sorrow since the death of his children and the wife of his youth had touched Lowell so nearly as this.

He still found refreshment in nature, comfort in his various work, and relaxation in friendly converse and letter writing; but his deepest joy in those dark years must have been in the expression of the war-time mood that gave us his best political essays, "The Washers of the Shroud," the second series of the " Biglow Papers," and the "Commemoration Ode."

Although the burden of the first series of the
"Biglow Papers" had been a plea for peace in
a time of what seemed to Lowell unrighteous
war, he was never a supine peace lover; and
even at the time he was writing such lines as
"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,'

he could still, in his Palfrey poem, mention the advantages of a "whiff of Naseby." In 1857, after the Dred Scott decision, he wrote to Mr. Norton: "So now the lists are open, and we shall soon find where the tougher lance-shafts are grown, North or South." He did not at that time, of course, foresee the purging tragedy of war that the country was to undergo, but he was keenly aware of the momentousness of the things that were at stake in America, and of the magnitude of the approaching crisis. In 1858 he printed in the "Atlantic" four very notable

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