454 



LOWELL, JAMES RUSSELL. 



years ago I was walking through the 

 Jotch, and stopped to chat with a hermit, 



the wisdom, the good sense that pervade these 

 essays, never lose their charm. Lowell's prose is 

 more flowing, more simple, and more stately in 

 its simplicity, than is his poetry. One loves to 

 be alone wi'th his books, because they are com- 

 panions, of the most genial sort, or in company 

 with them that others may share what is so in- 

 tensified by sympathy. They are the kind of 

 literature that one finds himself reading aloud 

 all alone, that he may make the ear happy as 

 well as the eye. We forget that we are reading, 

 until the smile on our lips has turned to a laugh 

 and recalls us to our surroundings. Lowell is 

 pre-eminently quotable, without seeming epi- 

 grammatic in the sense in which Emerson is. 

 Nearly every sentence has a finished thought, but 

 the connection is so easy and so complete that 

 the first impression is that the thought needs its 

 setting. 



His appreciation of Yankee character, and 

 humorous setting forth of it, is as delightful in 

 prose as in verse. Two or three extracts from 

 " A Moosehead Journal," and ' Cambridge Thirty 

 Years ago," are at once illustrations of the au- 

 thor's perception and of his style : 



Nineteen 

 Franconia Notch, 



who fed with gradual logs the unwearied teeth of a 

 saw mill. As the strident steel slit off the slabs of 

 the logs, so did the less willing machine of talk, ac- 

 quiring a steadier up-and-down motion, pare away 

 that outwark bark of conversation which protects the 

 core, and which, like other bark, has naturally most 

 to do with the weather, the season, and the heat of 

 the day. At length I asked him the best point of 

 view for the Old Man of the Mountain. 



" Dunno never see it." 



Too young and too happy either to feel or to affect 

 the Horatian indifference, I was sincerely astonished, 

 and I expressed it. The log-compelling man at- 

 tempted no justification, but after a little asked : 



" Come from Baws'n ? " 



" Yes," with peninsular pride. 



" Goodie to see in the wciuity o' Baws'n." 



" Oh. yes ! " I said ; and I thought, see Boston and 

 die ! See the State Houses, old and new, the cater- 

 pillar wooden bridges crawling with innumerable 

 legs across the flats of the Charles ; see the Common 

 largest park, doubtless, in the world with its files 

 of trees planted as if by a drill-sergeant, and then 

 for your nunc dimittis. 



" I should like 'awl, I should like to stan' on Bunker 

 Hill. You've been there offen, likely ? " 



" N-o-o," unwillingly, seeing the little end of the 

 horn in clear vision^ at the terminus of this Socratic 

 perspective. 



" 'Awl, my young frien', you've larned neow thet 

 wut a man kin see any day for nuwthin', childern 

 half-price, he never doos see. Nawthin' pay, nawthin' 

 vally." 



As I walked on, I said to myself : " There is one 

 exception, wise hermit. It is just these gratis pictures 

 which the poet puts in his show-box. The divine 

 faculty is to see what everybody can look at." 



Again from " A Moosehead Journal " : 



Uncle Zeb was a good specimen of this palaeozoic 

 class, extinct among us for the most part, or surviv- 

 ing, like the dodo, in the Botany Bays of society. If 

 talk seemed to be flagging, our uncle would put the 

 heel of one boot upon the toe of the other, to bring it 

 within point-blank range, and say, " Wahl, I stump 

 the devil himself to make that 'ere boot hurt my 

 foot," leaving us in doubt whether it were the virtue 

 of the foot or its' case which set at naught the wiles of 

 the adversary. 



This characteristic bit of insight of another 

 sort is also taken from ' A Moosehead Journal " : 



Practical application is the only mordant which 

 will set things in the memory. Study, without it, is 

 gymnastics and not work, which alone will get intel- 

 lectual bread. One learns more metaphysics from a 

 single temptation than from all the philosophers. It 

 is curious, though, how tyrannical the habit of read- 

 ing is, and what shifts we make to escape thinking. 

 There is no bore we dread being left alone with so 

 much as our own minds. I have seen a sensible man 

 study a stale newspaper in a country tavern, and hus- 

 band it as he would an old shoe on a raft after ship- 

 wreck. "Why not try a bit of hibernation? There 

 are few brains that would not be better for living on 

 their own fat a little while. With these reflections, 

 I, notwithstanding, spent the afternoon over my re- 

 port. If our own experience is of so little use to us, 

 what a dolt is he who recommends to man or nations 

 the experience of others. 



From the enchanting picture of " Cambridge 

 Thirty Years ago " is the following: 



It is more often true that a man who could scarce 

 be induced to expose his unclothed body even to a 

 village of prairie dogs will complacently display a 

 mind as naked as the day it was born, without so 

 much as a fig-leaf of acquirement on it, in every gal- 

 lery of Europe. If not with a robe dyed in the lyrian 

 purple of imaginative culture, if not with the close- 

 fitting, work-a-day dress of social or business training 

 at least, my dear Storg, one might provide himself 

 with the merest waist-clout of modesty. 



One can fancy his quiet glee as he wrote in 

 " Cambridge Thirty Years ago." of a joke re- 

 peated by each incoming college class, upon a 

 deacon who " kept store " in the village : 



Enter A, and asks gravely, " Have you any sour 

 apples, deacon 2 " 



" Well, no, I haven't any just now that are exactly 

 sour ; but there's the bell-flower apple, and folks that 

 like a sour apple generally like that." Exit A. 



Enter B. " Have you any sweet apples, deacon ? " 



" Well, no, I haven't any iust now that are exactly 

 sweet; but there's the bell-flower apple, and folks 

 that like a sweet apple generally like that." 



In " Italy," he says : 



Coming from a country where everything seems 

 shifting like a quicksand ; where men shed their 

 homes as snakes their skins ; where you may meet a 

 three-story house, or even a church, on the highway, 

 bitten by the universal gad-fly of bettering its posi- 

 tion ; where we have known a tree to be cut down 

 merely because " it had got to be so old," the sense of 

 permanence, unchangealbleness, and repose which 

 Italy gives us is delightful. 



This is a quotation from the essay on Keats : 



One can not help contrasting Keats with Words- 

 worth the one altogether poet, the other essentially 

 a Wordsworth, with the poetic faculty added: the 

 one shifting from form to form and from style to 

 style, and pouring his hot, throbbing life into everv 

 mold ; the other remaining always the individual, 

 producing works, and not so much living in his po- 

 ems as memorially recording his life in them. W T hen 

 Wordsworth alludes to the foolish criticisms on his 



^writings, he speaks serenely and generously of Words- 

 worth, the poet, as if he were an unbiased third per- 

 son, who talces up the argument merely in the inter- 

 est of literature. He towers with a bald egotism 

 which is quite above and beyond selfishness. Poesy 



- was his employment ; it was Keats's very existence, 

 and he felt the rough treatment of his verses as if it 

 had been the wounding of a limb. To Wordsworth 

 composing was a healthy exercise: his slow pulse 

 and imperturbable self- trust gave him assurance of 



