LOWELL, JAMES RUSSELL. 



447 



he was no plagiarist in humanity. His 

 Duality .informs all he has said or written, so 

 .in to seethe expression of the eye 

 the attitude c,f body as well as mind in 

 lich he was when the pen obeyed the will, 

 s all-pervading wit and humor, allied to 

 probably the qualities that occasion 



to his mental ancestry, that, too, was of the 

 bluest blood. The influence of this ancestry 

 lie traced, perhaps, but here, too, he has 



It he result of study his own by assimilation. 

 iriginal by his own definition, given in his 

 assay on Thoreau. " Originality consists in the 

 i of digesting and assimilating thoughts so 

 that they become part of our life and substance. 

 aig'ne. for example, is one of the most 

 original of authors, though he helped himself to 

 in every direction. But they turn to 

 and coloring in his style, and give a fresh- 

 ness of complexion that is forever charming." 

 ii. in his essay on Keats, he says: "Men 

 have their intellectual ancestry, and the likeness 

 of some one of them is forever unexpectedly 

 flashing out in the features of a descendant, it 

 may be after a gap of several generations. In 

 the parliament of the present every man repre- 

 iits a constituency of the past." 

 Not only were Lowell's opportunities for study 

 ich as few boys of his time possessed, but a pas- 

 sionate love of books made his reading not so 

 much study as loving intimacy with the authors 

 who talked through them. It is the belief that 

 such men as Lowell will read that makes such 

 men as Shakespeare, Dante, Cervantes, Haw- 

 thorne, and Browning write. In his essay on 

 " Some Letters of Walter Savage Landor," he 

 gives us this picture of his early habits of study : 

 " I was first directed to Landor's works by hear- 

 ing how much store Emerson set by them. I 

 grew acquainted with them fifty years ago in 

 one of those arched alcoves in the old college 

 librarv in Harvard Hall which so pleasantly se- 

 cluded without wholly isolating the student. 

 That foot-steps should pass across the mouth of 

 his Aladdin's cave, or even enter it in search of 

 treasure, so far from disturbing only deepened 

 his sense of possession. These faint rumors of 

 the world he had left served but as a pleasant 

 reminder that he was the privileged denizen of 

 another, beyond ' the flaming bounds of place 

 and time.' There, with my book lying at ease 

 and in the expansion of intimacy on the broad 

 window-shelf, shifting my cell from north to 

 south with the season, I made friendships, that 

 have lasted me for life, with Dodsley s ' Old 

 Plays,' with Cotton's ' Montaigne,' with Hak- 

 luyt's ' Voyages,' among others that were not in 

 my fathers library. It was the merest browsing, 

 no doubt, as Johnson called it, but how delight- 

 ful it was ! All the more, I fear, because it add- 

 ed the stolen sweetness of truancy to that of 

 study, for I should have been buckling to my 

 task'of the day. I do not regret that diversion 

 of time to other than legitimate expenses, yet 

 shall I not gravely warn my grandson to beware 

 of doing the like t I was far from understanding 

 all I heard in the society of my elders into which 

 I had smuggled myself, and perhaps it was as 

 well for me; but those who formed it condescend- 

 ed to me at odd moments with the tolerant com- 



placency of greatness, and I did not go away emp- 

 ty. Landor was in many ways beyond me, but I 

 loved the company lie brought, making persons 

 for me of what had before been futile mum -." 

 Mr. Lowull held in such abhorrence the ctiptom, 

 so prevalent of late, of blending the public and 

 private affairs of men and women known to 

 fame, that in writing of him one feels even more 

 than usually shy of seeming to intrude upon any 

 privacy but that which may, after all, be called 

 the most sacred ; for what is the laying bare of 

 the soul, as Lowell in common with all critical 

 writers constantly did, but spreading abroad to 

 the best of one's ability a man's inmost nature f 

 In a tribute to his friend, Dr. Oliver Wendell 

 Holmes says : 



I am thinking now not of Lowell's wonderful jri 

 and acquirements, but of his charming companion- 

 ship. If ho had any fault in that relation, it wa* a 

 too generous estimate of his friends. He loved to ap- 

 prove anything which they had done, and may !-"n.' 

 times have been partial LnmS Jadflment Yet lie had 

 the courage to warn a friend if lie thought he was fall- 

 ing short of his own standard of excellence. In gen- 

 eral company his talk was easy, lively, witty, good- 

 humored, often jocular, and was capable of condescend- 

 ing to a pun when the temptation was strong. With 

 all his vast reading, lie was not in the habit of quot- 

 ing passages of prose or verse from the authors with 

 whom he was familiar. I speak with some hesita- 

 tion, but I question whether he remembered con-_ 

 tinuous extracts as readily and surely as some of hid 

 literary contemporaries Browning, for instance. But 

 on all literary Questions he was an encyclopaedia of 

 information. Ilis mind was top robust to be smoth- 

 ered under any load of erudition. Without any of 

 that nervous Irritability which belongs to oversensi- 

 tive and under-vitalize'd organizations, he was alive, 

 alive all over to the shows of the outer world and the 

 movements in the inner world of consciousness. He 

 had an eye and an ear for the trees and flowers and 

 birds of Elmwood ; he recognized elements of beauty 

 in the lazy Charles, which flowed by his windows, its 

 waters now brackish and turbid from the inland 

 streams, now salt and lucid from the ocean. Its 

 broken and reedy banks ? the monotonous expanse of 

 ite marshes were dear to his indulgent outlook. There 

 are no gifts so munificent as those which the poet's 

 eye bestows upon its humblest surroundings. 



In regard to the personal and anecdotal man- 

 ner of writing biography, Lowell says, in his essay 

 on " Izaak Walton " : 



The modern biographer has become so indiscrim- 

 inate, so unconscious of the relative importance of 

 a single life to the universe, so careless of the just 

 limits whether of human interest or endurance, so 

 communistic in assuming that all men are entitled to 

 an equal share of what little time there is left in the 

 world, that many a worthy whom a paragraph from 

 the right pen might have immortalized is suffocated 

 in the trackless swamps of two octavos. I am in- 

 clined to apply what was said of states to men also. 

 and call him nippiest who has left fewest materials for 

 history.. It is at least doubtful whether gisip gain 

 body "by bottling. In these chattering days, when 

 nobody who really i* nobody can stir forth without 

 the volunteer accompaniment of a brass band, when 

 there is a certificated eye at every key-hole, and when 

 the public informer has become so essential a minis- 

 ter to the general comfort that the world can not go 

 about its business of a morning till its intellectual ap- 

 petitc is appeased with the latest doinir>'and savings 

 of John Doe and Richard Roe, there is healing in the 

 gentlemanlike reserves of the past, a benign sense of 

 seclusion, a comfort nueh as loved hands bring to 

 fevered brows, in the thought of one who, like \N al- 



