spring of 1891. As Lowell, gray and ill, stood in the doorway of Elmwood, saying farewell, there came from over the way a strain of music which, as he said, he had last heard at a brilliant assembly in London. It gave him, as it seemed, a flashing memory of all his rich and various life, so pathetically near its end.

In the hot July of 1891 Lowell fell ill of the gravest attack of his malady that he had yet suffered. After some days a delirium came upon him, in which he fancied he was meeting royal personages and seemed continually imploring to be taken home to Elmwood. The delirium passed, but the end was near. On the 12th of August he died.

Lowell the Man.

Looking backward over the various life whose secret unity we have endeavored to recapture, two things should be plain: it was a true vita vitalis wherein action and dream played each its due part; and, after the fever of youth was over, the man who lived it ripened and mellowed consistently to the end. In one of those passages of his essay on Dante, where his humanist's witch-wand of sympathetic imagination pointed most sensitively to the springs of character, Lowell says that the Tuscan poet was shaped by "rank, ease, love, study, affairs, state

craft, hope, exile, hunger, dependence, despair." Lowell himself knew all the more beneficent disciplines of this series, and, allowing for the softer conditions of modern life, he was not ignorant of their bitter brethren. His life was indeed marked by a certain propitious continuity; it held more of leisure than most men's; it had few tragic crises, few frustrations; yet beneath its seeming happy content black waters ran. He knew well the pain of human loss by death, and he knew another duller, more numbing pain, as, one after another, four members of his household suffered mental disease. So he was shaped into the wise, humorous, graciously human man still remembered by many as better than anything he ever

wrote.

Yet, like all humanists, he was something of a problem to his lovers, to his critics, and to himself. In particular on the great question: Was he simple, or was he subtle? there are clashing voices. Mr. Henry James, with the habitual desire of a subtle man to find other seemingly subtle fellows simple, says: "He had no experimental sympathies, and no part of him was traitor to the rest. . . . Subtlety in his intelligence found expression in linguistics."

Mr. Howells, on the other hand, with his sensitive perception of temperament says: "His nature was not always serene or pellucid; it was

sometimes roiled by the currents that counter and cross in all of us: but it was without the least alloy of insincerity, and it was never darkened by the shadow of a selfish fear."

Lowell himself, with the partial knowledge of introspection, is constantly writing of warring impulses and tendencies in himself, captained now, as in his lyrical fairy tale "Uncle Cobus's Story," by "Fan-ta-si-a " (by which we may understand "the Spence negligence") and “Elbo-gres," now by the spirits of Hope and Despair. Yet Leslie Stephen wisest of critics of essential character has recorded that his chief impression of Lowell, after years of the closest intimacy, was "of his unvarying sweetness and simplicity of unmixed kindliness and thorough wholesomeness of nature."

...

Viewing Lowell's life as a whole, the truth may perhaps be seen to occupy its customary medial position. Psychologically, with his visions and his recurrent disturbing sense of secondary personality, he was undoubtedly highly complex. So was he, also, temperamentally, with his conflicting inherited impulses toward idleness and action. He was complex and subtle in his intellect, with its vast variety of mental furniture, its odd irrelevancies, its unstable union of skepticism and faith. All these diverse qualities went to make up a "myriad-minded" humanist, who

had in his own phrase something of the "multanimous nature of the poet" and longed for many lives and many careers. Yet, air-spun as the distinction may seem, the complexity in Lowell was only in his psychology, temperament, intellect; his character was all the while simple and sin

cere.

This unity in variety which is the law of any sound and vital personality appears in all his traits. The one irreducible factor in his equation was an irrepressible whimsicality of a kind more often found in low-voltage men than in men of Lowell's grade of power. In part it was the mere ebullition of animal spirits, in part it was the froth that is blown from deep-tossing waters. Doubtless the attrition of an earnest New England environment upon "the Spence negligence" fostered it. But it is as idle to inquire further into its origins as to regret it. Lowell's boyish readiness to laugh at the wrong time certainly gave rise to blemishes in his poetry and in his prose, yet it was part and parcel of the mood that gave us the "Biglow Papers and of the essence of his most delightful self. Lowell was not one of those shadowy whimsicalists in whom sentimentalizing whimsies slowly sap the foundations of character. Hence his irony was in the employ of optimism — not of pessimism. It consorted oddly with that rigid

Puritanism which no true-born New Englander wholly outgrows, but never disintegrated it.

Indeed, not in "Humanism" but in "Puritanism" do we find, after all, the secret unity of Lowell's character. Throughout his formal writing from first to last, as well as in his familiar letters, we never cease to feel under all his chameleon play of mood a solid core of character in which the deep sense of personal responsibility is the principle of life. In all his prose there is no more characteristic passage than that in his essay on Dante, where he says:

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Very hateful to his fervid heart and sincere mind would have been the modern theory which deals with sin as involuntary error, and by shifting off the fault to the shoulders of Atavism or those of Society, personified for purposes of excuse, but escaping into impersonality again from the grasp of retribution, weakens that sense of responsibility which is the root of self-respect and the safeguard of character." Here, if I mistake not, is the very voice of the Puritan spirit.

But though these subtleties of temperament are closely related to certain contradictions in Lowell's printed work, they certainly were of little account to the people who knew and loved him as a man.