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Barring certain occasional hauteurs not unbecoming in "the Marquis of Thompson's Lot," in whom many men were always conscious of an older and finer civilization than their own, and barring that active detestation of "Bores" in which his writings abound, Lowell was a thoroughly generous-minded and lovable man. His yearning for personal affection was expressed almost tremulously everywhere in his letters. They are full of phrases like "You must try to like me," "So long as you like me, I don't care how you like my work," and "I want you to like me," repeated and repeated again to both men and women. Nor do his correspondents appear to have been at all backward in responding to his wish. Throughout his life we find traces of the Platonic warmth of his friendship, and discover how in our so critical and quizzical age he preserved a certain young, transcendental ardor of affection, and was curiously unashamed of the frank expression of it. Up to middle life his friendships were chiefly with men. Like his own Fitz Adam he seems a little to have misliked woman,

"Not from cross or whim,

But that his mother shared too much in him.”

From about his fiftieth year onward, however, as the more masculine side of his nature was developed by dealing with affairs, the most inti

mate of his new friendships came by a natural paradox to be with high-bred, rich-natured women, in Spain, in England, and at home.

His sympathies never lost the true humanist's scope. From first to last he had a keen gust for "the gamy flavor of the bookless man," and was always eager for a chat with some salty sailorman or racy-tongued guide. Though when ostentatiously uncollared humanity appeared in Literature with a song of itself and the Cosmos, the Marquis of Thompson's Lot was pretty sure to dislike it.

People liked to be with Lowell not alone because of his charming talk; his person was as pleasing as his sensitive perceptions or his picturesque animation of phrase. He was five feet seven inches in height, a little inclined to be stout, but brisk and vigorous. His coloring was fresh and ruddy, with hair and beard of a bright reddish brown that never wholly faded into gray. His eyes, in their setting of kindly wrinkles, telling of humorous judgments and bookish days and nights, were of a clear blue-gray. They were described by a work-woman in the house of one of his friends as the "coaxinest eyes." His voice was of a pleasant tone and quality, and his manner of speech was always that of one who had a respect for his native tongue.

This was the man his friends knew and loved,

notwithstanding the slightly exaggerated manner that strangers sometimes misunderstood. With an almost lapidary concision, Holmes has expressed a friend's view of Lowell in a single stanza of his memorial poem:

"The singer whom we long have held so dear

Was Nature's darling, shapely, strong, and fair, —
Of keenest wit, of judgment crystal-clear,
Easy of converse, courteous, debonair."

CHAPTER VII

LOWELL'S POETRY

IN the chapters that have gone before, the writer's endeavor was to look at the world through Lowell's eyes, to see his work as his contemporaries saw it, to know the man as his friends knew him. But in this and the following chapter his affair is one of objective criticism. It is time now to consider Lowell's written work in the cool, undeceptive light of "ce lendemain sévère" - that dispassionate to-morrow in which whatever a man's work has of caducity or of vitality is seen for what it is.

Lowell was but five years old when Tennyson, aged fourteen, chiseled Byron is Dead upon a rock at Somersby, and "the whole world seemed darkened for him." Yet with that tardiness that long marked our literature, America, in the thirties, was the intellectual contemporary of England in the teens, and in much of his earliest poetry Lowell partook of the Byronic mood, a little colored by the related mood of Blair and Young, who still helped to sway cis-Atlantic

poetic taste. His undergraduate verse, in its satirical sallies, its easy world pain, its occupation with nocturnal mystery and melancholy, held a Byronism that was symptomatic of the author's time and place even more than of his own youthful predicament. Yet in his first volume, printed in 1841, Byronism is not conspicuous. Transcendentalism is now his motive, and Spenser, his early love, is the poet from whom his imagery mostly derives, though occasional echoes of Tennyson, Keats, Wordsworth, Landor, and the Jacobeans begin to be heard. In the 1844 volume the old writers are more and the moderns less in evidence. Thence onward, as his poetry became more and more 66 a definite faculty" instead of "a boundless sense of power," it became the more self-expressive; it was, in a sense, increasingly bookish, yet decreasingly imitative.

One of the most constant and characteristic qualities of the verse in the two volumes published in 1841 and 1844, and in his pieces in periodicals within those years, was a certain weirdness, amounting at times to extravagance, of imagery. The macabre, the supernatural, the fantastic, "a Mermaid's green eyelash," these were the things his imagination ran riot with, and doubtless they were the images found poetic by his early readers. Yet for a reader to-day they possess no illusion. They open no vistas of perilous

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