Read Ebook: James Russell Lowell A Biography; vol 2/2 by Scudder Horace Elisha

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"Dear Land, whom triflers now make bold to scorn, How nobler shall the sun Flame in thy sky, how braver breathe thy air, That thou bred'st children who for thee couldst dare And die as thine have done!"

For the one note, in the discord of the war, heard more and more clearly by Lowell, was that of triumph for democracy as incarnate in his country. No one can read his writings from this time forward without observing how deep a passion this love of his country was. In earlier life he had had a passion for Freedom, and the Freedom which was to him as the Lady to her knight, was very comprehensive and took many forms. Now, in his maturity, and when he saw the one great blot fading from the escutcheon, there was a steady concentration of passion upon that incorporation of freedom in the fair land which seemed to his imagination to have gotten her soul, and no longer Earth's biggest country, but to have

"risen up Earth's greatest nation."

The advertisement, however, which Crosby & Nichols put forth no doubt with a dignified elation, excited Lowell's ire, and he gave vent to his annoyance in a rhymed letter to his colleague:--

"DEAR CHARLES,--

I am mad as a piper And could bite those old files like a viper, Reading their d--d advertisement For donkeys, and not for the wise, meant, I feel as if the rogues meant to work us Like the clowns of a travelling circus, Blowing their trumpets before us In a brazen and asinine chorus, Sending advance troops of blackguards To blear all the fences with placards,-- 'This is the famous Dan Rice, sirs, Whose jokes are beyond any price, sirs, And this is that eminent man Joe Grimes, so sublime on the banjo, And especially great in the prances Of the best Ethiopian dances!' Why, I feel my shamed visage o'erdarkle With my last evening's waterproof charcoal! Dear Charles, all your articles toss by And see Messrs. Nichols and Crosby: Curl up your moustache like a bandit And tell 'em we never will stand it To be treated Like a couple of literate porkers I'd go, but must hurry to college To help the confusion of knowledge, So remain Your true friend, as you know well, !!!!'The world famous James Russell Lowell Shuperior every way vastly To the late justly-favorite Astley!!!!'"

In the July number Lowell recurs more distinctly to the fundamental questions involved in the war, since his task is to place in comparison two historical works issuing from opposite sides, Pollard's initial volume of "The Southern History of the War," devoted to the first year, and the first volume of Greeley's treatise, "The American Conflict." As these two, and more especially the latter, naturally set about accounting for the war, Lowell makes them the text for his article, "The Rebellion: its Causes and Consequences." The breadth of the theme tempts him into an introductory discussion of the several modes of writing history, and an inquiry into the spirit in which history in the making should be interpreted, but his real business, when he gets at it, is to examine the political character of the nation at the breaking out of the war, and to trace the insidious influence of slavery on national politics. He repeats in newer and more forcible phrases the contention, so often made by him, that the corruption of government had been going on steadily under this subtle solvent, and that the hope of the nation was in the extinction of so disturbing an element. He applies the truth to the political situation in the approaching election, and warns the South that "there is no party at the North, considerable in numbers or influence, which could come into power on the platform of making peace with the Rebels on their own terms. No party can get possession of the government which is not in sympathy with the temper of the people, and the people, forced into war against their will by the unprovoked attack of pro-slavery bigotry, are resolved on pushing it to its legitimate conclusion. War means now, consciously with many, unconsciously with most, but inevitably, abolition.... If the war be waged manfully, as becomes a thoughtful people, without insult or childish triumph in success, if we meet opinion with wiser opinion, waste no time in badgering prejudice till it becomes hostility, and attack slavery as a crime against the nation, and not as individual sin, it will end, we believe, in making us the most powerful and prosperous community the world ever saw."

Though he wrote hopefully in his public articles, Lowell's letters show alternations of hope and discouragement, and intimate how much the war disturbed his peace of mind. He wrote to Mr. Norton, midway between the July and October numbers: "I shall say nothing about politics, my dear Charles, for I feel rather down in the mouth, and moreover I have not had an idea so long that I should not know one if I saw it. The war and its constant expectation and anxiety oppress me. I cannot think. If I had enough to leave behind me, I could enlist this very day and get knocked in the head. I hear bad things about Mr. Lincoln and try not to believe them."

"Mr. Lincoln, in our judgment, has shown from the first the considerate wisdom of a practical statesman. If he has been sometimes slow in making up his mind, it has saved him the necessity of being hasty to change it when once made up, and he has waited till the gradual movement of the popular sentiment should help him to his conclusions and sustain him in them. To be moderate and unimpassioned in revolutionary times that kindle natures of a more flimsy texture, may not be a romantic quality, but it is a rare one, and goes with those massive understandings on which a solid structure of achievement may be reared. Mr. Lincoln is a long-headed and long-purposed man, who knows when he is ready,--a secret General McClellan never learned.... We have seen no reason to change our opinion of Mr. Lincoln since his wary scrupulousness won him the applause of one party, or his decided action, when he was at last convinced of its necessity, made him the momentary idol of the other. We will not call him a great man, for over-hasty praise is too apt to sour at last into satire, and greatness may be trusted safely to history and the future; but an honest one we believe him to be, and with no aim save to repair the glory and the greatness of his country."

The ground-swell of emotion which stirs the verses written in that winter of 1865, just before spring came, and when the buds of peace were already beginning to open, is expressive of that strong personal feeling which entered into Lowell's measure of the sacrifice which had been made when he reckoned on the great gain that was to accrue to the nation. Poetry, and especially that cast in a homely mould, was his vent for this feeling. He rarely showed emotion in his prose, but in the article which he wrote a few weeks later when the end was just in sight, he discloses in another way, and almost as strongly, the depth of his nature, for in this article on "Reconstruction" there is scarcely any of that play of wit which marks his earlier political papers.

"Come, while our country feels the lift Of a gret instinct shoutin' 'Forwards!'"

Hosea Biglow had just sung with tearful eyes and firm set lips, and Lowell's whole nature seemed to rise in an eager desire to grapple with the great problem which was to confront the nation as soon as the last gun had been fired. The quiet, stately opening of the subject as he recounts with deep pride the attitude of the country, and the splendid attestation it had given of the staying power of democracy, is followed by a close examination of the main lines of policy to be followed in the reconstruction of the insurgent states. "We did not enter," he says, "upon war to open a new market, or fresh fields for speculators, or an outlet for redundant population, but to save the experiment of democracy from destruction, and put it in a fairer way of success by removing the single disturbing element. Our business now is not to allow ourselves to be turned aside from a purpose which our experience thus far has demonstrated to have been as wise as it was necessary, and to see to it that, whatever be the other conditions of reconstruction, democracy, which is our real strength, receive no detriment."

Hence, after some wise words regarding the treatment of the governing class at the South, and a penetrating exposition of the relation between these and the non-slaveholding class, he applies himself most closely to a study of the situation as regards the blacks, with the conclusion that the prime necessity is to make them land-holders and to give them the ballot. There are some sentences which have a mournful sound read to-day, thirty-five years after the discussion. "We believe the white race, by their intellectual and traditional superiority, will retain sufficient ascendancy to prevent any serious mischief from the new order of things." "As to any prejudices which should prevent the two races from living together, it would soon yield to interest and necessity." He is aware of the difficulties which beset the subject, but he contends that the large way is the only way. "If we are to try the experiment of democracy fairly, it must be tried in its fullest extent, and not halfway.... The opinion of the North is made up on the subject of emancipation, and Mr. Lincoln has announced it as the one essential preliminary to the readmission of the insurgent States. To our mind, citizenship is the necessary consequence, as it is the only effectual warranty, of freedom; and accordingly we are in favor of distinctly settling beforehand some conditional right of admission to it. We have purposely avoided any discussion on gradualism as an element in emancipation, because we consider its evil results to have been demonstrated in the British West Indies. True conservative policy is not an anodyne hiding away our evil from us in a brief forgetfulness. It looks to the long future of a nation, and dares the heroic remedy where it is scientifically sure of the nature of the disease."

The character, of the work he was noticing led him at the beginning of his paper into some reflections on the part played by newspapers in modern times, and the stimulus given to national sensitiveness by the quick transmission of news. "It is no trifling matter," he says, "that thirty millions of men should be thinking the same thought and feeling the same pang at a single moment of time, and that these vast parallels of latitude should become a neighborhood more intimate than many a country village. The dream of Human Brotherhood seems to be coming true at last. The peasant who dipped his net in the Danube, or trapped the beaver on its banks, perhaps never heard of Caesar, or of Caesar's murder; but the shot that shattered the forecasting brain, and curdled the warm, sweet heart of the most American of Americans, echoed along the wires through the length and breadth of a continent, swelling all eyes at once with tears of indignant sorrow. Here was a tragedy fulfilling the demands of Aristotle, and purifying with an instantaneous throb of pity and terror a theatre of such proportions as the world never saw. We doubt if history ever recorded an event so touching and awful as this sympathy, so wholly emancipated from the toils of space and time that it might seem as if earth were really sentient, as some have dreamed, or the great god Pan alive again to make the hearts of nations stand still with his shout. What is Beethoven's 'Funeral March for the Death of a Hero' to the symphony of love, pity, and wrathful resolve which the telegraph of that April morning played on the pulses of a nation?"

The ode did at once assert its high character, yet it must be borne in mind that the very reason of its form acted somewhat against its immediate popularity. It is truly an ode to be recited, and as a chorus depends for its power upon a volume of sound, so this ode needs, to bring out its full value, a great delivery. Lowell himself, always a sympathetic reader, had no such power of recitation as would at once convey to his audience a notion of the stateliness and procession of words which attaches to the ode. The impression of the hour was produced by the spontaneous outpouring of the heart of Phillips Brooks in prayer. "That," says President Eliot, "was the most impressive utterance of a proud and happy day. Even Lowell's Commemoration Ode did not at the moment so touch the hearts of his hearers; that one spontaneous and intimate expression of Brooks's noble spirit convinced all Harvard men that a young prophet had risen up in Israel."

Lowell's explanation of the form of the ode is significant. So native to him was the most genuine literary spirit that he could conceive of the ode and its delivery as one consistent whole without being perturbed by the consideration that he was to deliver it and to a modern audience trained in the reading of poetry, not in the hearing of it. Both the poetic reciter and the recipients were wanting, and the ode remains, a noble piece of declamation indeed for whoever has the great gift of poetic declamation, yet after all as surely to be read and not spoken as Browning's dramas are to be read and not acted. It is this fine literary sense, penetrating even to a supposititious occasion, which clings to the ode and makes it so far caviare to the general. Yet it would be false indeed to regard such a statement as final. The fire which burned in Lowell's members, leaving him cold afterward, glows in the great lines, and certain it is that at no other single poem, unless it be Whitman's "My Captain," does the young American of the generation born since the war so kindle his patriotic emotions.

The sixth stanza was not recited, but was written immediately afterward. It is so completely imbedded in the structure of the ode that it is difficult to think of it as an afterthought. It is easy to perceive that while the glow of composition and of recitation was still upon him Lowell suddenly conceived this splendid illustration and indeed climax of the utterance of the Ideal which is so impressive in the fifth stanza. So free, so spontaneous is this characterization of Lincoln, and so concrete in thought, that it has been most frequently read, we suspect, of any single portion of the ode, and it is so eloquent that one likes to fancy the whole force of the ode behind it, as if Lowell needed the fire he had fanned to white heat, for the very purpose of forging this last, firm tempered bit of steel.

Into these threescore lines Lowell has poured a conception of Lincoln which may justly be said to be to-day the accepted idea which Americans hold of their great President. It was the final expression of the judgment which had slowly been forming in Lowell's own mind, and when he summed him up in his last line,--

"New birth of our new soul, the first American,"

he was honestly throwing away all the doubts which had from time to time beset him, and letting his ardent pursuit of the ideal, his profound faith in democracy as incarnate in his country, centre in this one man.

POETRY AND PROSE

His safety-valve during all this period was in his letters to his familiar friends, as it was also in the free talk which he held with them; and this, even though he chafed under restraint and pressure which seemed to him to lessen his spontaneity. "How malicious you are," he writes to Miss Norton, 23 October, 1858, "about what I said of women's being good letter writers! What I meant was that they wrote more unconsciously than we do. I don't know how it is with other folks, but I cannot sit down now and write a letter as if I were talking. Good writing, I take it, can only result from necessity of expression, and an author satisfies that in so many ways that his letters are apt to be dull.

"I like 'Miles Standish' better than you do. I think it in some respects the best long poem L. has written. It is so simple and picturesque, and the story is not encumbered with unavailing description, which is a fault in 'Evangeline.' But I quite agree with you about the metre. It is too deceitfully easy.

"One might begin at dawn nor end till the purple twilight, Stringing verses at will, nor know it was verse he was stringing. This is the modern way, the way of steamer and railroad Where all the work is done, you scarcely know how, by the Engine. Ah, but the Hill of Fame, can they dig it down? can they grade it? Difficult always is Good, and he, I guess, who attains it Starts with two feet and a staff and bread for To-day in his wallet, Footsore dropping at last, repaid by long hope of the summit."

In this article, also, one may see something of Lowell's feeling about England, which again was almost a traditionary sentiment. He saw the mother country through the glass of New England, and especially valued that Puritan strain in English history which had found such free play in New England. "Puritanism," he says, "believing itself quick with the seed of religious liberty, laid, without knowing it, the egg of democracy;" and he found in the governmental attitude of England toward America in his own day a reminder of the policy exercised after the Restoration toward New England.

Lowell's letters make it clear that at this time he was not given to the enjoyment of much hospitality. Mrs. Lowell was frequently an invalid, and though he had familiar friends to stay with him, as Rowse the painter, and gave cordial invitations to such as might be passing through Cambridge, he neither entertained much himself nor accepted entertainment at other houses. Now and then some man of letters came over from England or France and Lowell was asked to meet him. He records such an experience in a letter dated 20 September, 1861:--

"I dined the other day with Anthony Trollope, a big, red-faced, rather underbred Englishman of the bald-with-spectacles type. A good roaring positive fellow who deafened me till I thought of Dante's Cerberus. He says he goes to work on a novel 'just like a shoemaker on a shoe, only taking care to make honest stitches.' Gets up at 5 every day, does all his writing before breakfast, and always writes just so many pages a day. He and Dr. Holmes were very entertaining. The Autocrat started one or two hobbies, and charged, paradox in rest--but it was pelting a rhinoceros with seed-pearl.

"We paused," he says, "over every doubtful passage, discussed the various readings, considered the true meaning of obscure words and phrases, sought for the most exact equivalent of Dante's expression, objected, criticised, praised, with a freedom that was made perfect by Mr. Longfellow's absolute sweetness, simplicity, and modesty, and by the entire confidence that existed between us. Witte's text was always before us, and of the early commentators Buti was the one to whom we had most frequent and most serviceable recourse. They were delightful evenings; there could be no pleasanter occupation; the spirits of poetry, of learning, of friendship, were with us. Now and then some other friend or acquaintance would join us for the hours of study. Almost always one or two guests would come in at ten o'clock, when the work ended, and sit down with us to a supper, with which the evening closed."

But literature stood to him as the great exponent of all that was permanent in the human spirit. "There is much," he says, "that is deciduous in books, but all that gives them a title to rank as literature in the highest sense is perennial. Their vitality is the vitality not of one or another blood or tongue, but of human nature; their truth is not topical and transitory, but of universal acceptation; and thus all great authors seem the coevals not only of each other, but of whoever reads them, growing wiser with him as he grows wise, and unlocking to him one secret after another as his own life and experience give him the key, but on no other condition." It was with this principle determining his choice that he proceeded with more or less conscious assembling to discourse on Carlyle, Emerson, Lessing, Rousseau, Shakespeare, Dryden, Chaucer, Pope, Milton, Dante, Spenser, and Wordsworth, as well as to write in many detached passages on the genius of Goethe. Later he returned to the same general field, and besides revising his judgment on some of these topics, treated also with more or less fulness of Gray, Cervantes, Fielding, and Coleridge, while any one who consults the elaborate index to his prose writings will readily see how many other authors who belong in the great ranks have been drawn upon for illustration of the one great theme.

To his reading of all this literature he brought the touchstone of his own life and experience. In this word "experience," moreover, must be included his own highest experiments. His poetry, for the most part, as we have already seen, does not have its roots in other literature; it springs from that life which he held in common with those whom he reverenced for their own acts of literary creation. He quotes the recommendation of a friend that he should read poetry, feed himself on bee bread so that he might get into the mood of writing poetry; but, though all his life long Lowell fed, as by the most natural appetite, on poetry and other forms of imaginative literature, his own poetry is not bookish, nor does it borrow in form or phrase. Even when most impressionable in his youth, the influence upon him of Keats and Tennyson was more obvious than that of Shakespeare or Marlowe, only because, eschewing the imitative, his verse took the color of his generation. The likenesses were always general, and when he essayed forms of verse most rigid in their historical development, as the sonnet and the ode, he simply obeyed the law as his great progenitors had done, finding his freedom within the law, and not in outbreaks and protests. The conscious intention to be original, he himself says, seldom leads to anything better than extravagance; and there is a passage in his paper on Chaucer which sums up a large part of his literary philosophy.

"Poets have forgotten that the first lesson of literature, no less than of life, is the learning how to burn your own smoke; that the way to be original is to be healthy; that the fresh color, so delightful in all good writing, is won by escaping from the fixed air of self into the brisk atmosphere of universal sentiments; and that to make the common marvellous, as if it were a revelation, is the test of genius."

With his large literary essays as works of art I do not purpose concerning myself; such study lies somewhat outside the range of a biography, but as these papers formed a considerable and very important expression of his mind at one period of his life, it is worth while to look at them with a view to discover how far they serve to disclose him, to read them by the light of his experience, and to see if he put his personality into this form of writing. The publication of Carlyle's "Frederick the Great" was the occasion of the first of these articles. In writing of it to Leslie Stephen, when it was reprinted in "My Study Windows," he admits that he was harder on Carlyle than he meant to be, because he was fighting against a secret partiality. The phrase lets one a little into Lowell's mind. As far back as in his college days he was reading Carlyle with gusto, and the breezy description which he gave of Boston at the period when Carlyle's "message" acted as a sort of leaven in the new dough of New England, was a lively reminiscence of his own tumultuous youth. Thus, upon writing of Carlyle when he himself was nearing the line of fifty, there was an undercurrent of reminiscence of his own callowness. He remembered his devotion to the Carlyle of the "Miscellanies," and was more or less conscious that he had outlived his first enthusiasm. With all his admiration for the great critic who stirred him when he was himself pricking on the plain of Reform, his point of view was now changed, for he had left Carlyle's side and come into more complete possession of his own judgment. The secret influences which forbade him to be preponderatingly ethical, which kept him from abandoning himself to the anti-slavery cause, even when he was fighting in the ranks, and made it impossible for him to be a great teacher, though quite aware of what constitutes a great teacher, had lessened, perhaps, his effectiveness in some single direction, but had given him greater poise and enabled him on rare occasions to bring all his powers into play, and then to do easily, without conscious effort, the thing he wanted to do. The "Commemoration Ode" is an instance, and in this judgment of Carlyle he seems to me unwittingly to be judging the Lowell who seemed somewhat possible in the days when he first read Carlyle. There is a sentence in the essay which puts the thing in a nutshell. "The delicate skeleton of admirably articulated and related parts which underlies and sustains every true work of art, and keeps it from sinking on itself a shapeless heap, he would crush remorselessly to come at the marrow of meaning. With him the ideal sense is secondary to the ethical and metaphysical, and he has but a faint conception of their possible unity."

It was in the growing conception of this unity that Lowell had moved away from Carlyle. The constant adjustment of the ideal and the ethical had been the ripening process in his mind, a process greatly stimulated by the urgent need he felt during the past few years for finding some common ground on which his visions of truth and freedom and his practical sense could meet. It was largely through a great political realization that Lowell came to be what thenceforth he was, a sane critic of literature and a poet whose imagination instinctively sought large moulds. This is not to say that he was indifferent to any other expression; his nature was too free and spontaneous for that; but if one is to be measured by the main incidents of his life, it is fair to say that the Lowell who after this left his impress on his countrymen was a man of such balance of mind that his judgments and his poems alike had the weight that comes from this equipoise, and the man thus characterized could scarcely fail in new relations to show the ease of one self-centred, and not the restlessness and anxiety of an experimenter with life.

It is this consciousness of art governed by great laws, whether applied to life or to literature, that dominates Lowell's expression, and in the essay on Carlyle, his keenest criticism is called out by his perception of Carlyle's failure in this respect. "Had Mr. Carlyle been fitted out completely by nature as an artist, he would have had an ideal in his work which would have lifted his mind away from the muddier part of him, and trained him to the habit of seeking and seeing the harmony rather than the discord and contradiction of things." Again we read in this passage the unconscious reflection of its writer's own mind, which once had been far enough away from this habit. Nothing in Carlyle appears to interest him more than the lawlessness into which his exuberant humor had led him, and the narrow escape he had had of being a great poet, and he sums up his judgment of "Frederick the Great" by saying that "it has the one prime merit of being the work of a man who has every quality of a great poet except that supreme one of rhythm, which shapes both matter and manner to harmonious proportion, and that where it is good, it is good as only genius knows how to be."

Perhaps all this was in his mind when he wrote in his last "Biglow Paper:"--

These two productions were not to be the last of his political writings at this period. One more was to follow in October, but the impulse to take part in the discussion of national events was relaxed, and he was falling back into his more congenial life of devotion to letters in the quiet retreat of Elmwood. "My dear Charles," he writes to Mr. Norton, 30 May, 1866, "I snatch a moment from the whirl of dissipation to bring up for you the annals of Cambridge to the present date. In the first place, Cranch and his daughters are staying with us--since last Saturday. On that day I took him to club, where he saw many old friends and had a good time. We had a pleasant time, I guess. With me it was a business meeting. I sat between Hoar and Brimmer, that I might talk over college matters. Things will be arranged to suit me, I rather think, and the salary left even larger than I hoped.

"Your dream of a stock-farm is a delightful one , but I fear that the only stocks I am young enough for now are in railroad companies and the like whose golden fleeces yield a half yearly clip. I am satisfied, though, that nobody has such a sympathy with the seasons and feels himself so truly a partner in the trade of nature as a farmer. I find great pleasure in my own little ventures in this Earth-ship of ours on her annual voyages, and shall even grow jolly again if my college duties are so arranged next year that I shall get rid of some of my worries, and be able to give my trees and crops the encouragement of a cheerful face. Depend upon it, they feel it and grow in proportion. Fancy the disheartenmentof a regiment of cabbages or turnips when they see the commander-in-chief with a long face! Where shall they find the cheerful juices that shall carry them through a long drouth, or the happy temper that is as good as an umbrella to 'em in dull wet spells of weather, if their natural leader be as bloodless as the one, or show no better head than the other? Doesn't it stand to reason?"

"The Corporation have given me a tutor and cut my salary down to 00. But I think they will give me what they call a 'gratuity' if the college funds justify it. If not, I must take to lecturing.... I am called away to the hayfield, so good-by. I work more or less every day out of doors and like it. I am getting back as well as I can to my pristine ways of life."

"The work takes about three days to a volume, and I have the first two to go over again, because I corrected more than they are willing to pay for . I find some strange nonsense, chiefly caused by punctuation. The Donne, on which I spent three or four weeks of unremitting work, I have literally lost. Little & Brown don't want the expense of printing, and I have lost the book; can't find it anywhere. I find another copy--but perfectly clean!"

"Also: I have a jolly little poem that would do for a Christmas number, called 'Hob Gobbling's Song,' written years ago for my nephews, now all dead. Just think of it! and three of the four in battle. Who could have dreamed it twenty years ago?

"You will think I am mad to bombard you thus, but no, I am only beginning to feel the sort of spring impulse of my college freedom. I mean to work off old scores this winter if I can."

The fairy tale, "Uncle Cobus's Story," had pleasant fancy in it, but was curiously literary in its allusions and in its thinly concealed moral a parable of Lowell's own life, with its struggle for supremacy of the two fairies Fan-ta-si-a and El-bo-gres. The song might fairly be called a New England survival of Elizabethan fairy lore.

As a result of his industry during the summer and early fall, he was able to write at the end of October: "I have in my pocket 0 for my last six weeks' work, and mean for the first time in my life to make an investment of money earned!"

Specific criticism, with all the painstaking of which he was capable, was but the obverse of the medal which Lowell struck in his literary work. On the face was his generous delight in his books. "The Nightingale in the Study," written in the summer of 1867, holds in capital form a genuine confession that there was an appeal to him from nature in literature which did not antagonize the appeal made to him by the world of natural beauty, yet sometimes constrained and invited him in tones he could not resist, even though the birds without were calling him. Mr. Leslie Stephen who visited him in the summer of 1868, renewing an acquaintance begun five years earlier and ripening into a friendship which meant much to Lowell ever after, has given a pleasant account of the impression made upon him by the poet in his study at Elmwood. "All round us," he says, "were the crowded book-shelves, whose appearance showed them to be the companions of the true literary workman, not of the mere dilettante or fancy biographer. Their ragged bindings and thumbed pages scored with frequent pencil marks implied that they were a student's tools, not mere ornamental playthings. He would sit among his books, pipe in mouth, a book in hand, hour after hour; and I was soon intimate enough to sit by him and enjoy intervals of silence as well as periods of discussion and always delightful talk."

"'To order,' thought I, 'no, fiddle! 'Tis the dull world growing wiser.

"'My forehead they twine with bayses, They're eager to shout hosanna, My style as pure epic they praises Where they used to add acuanha.'

"So I read it aloud to my family, One delicate phrase after t'other, And surely the good little Sammle he Wasn't sadder at leaving his mother

"Than I when I came to the close of it, For I wanted, as I'm a sinner, To keep up my reading till dinner.

"But now, oh worst of collapses, My Temple of Fame is in ruins, Its forecourt, nave, transept, and apse is A shelter for foxes and bruins!

"For all of my Public Opinion With the wind in its sails to drive it To the port of supreme dominion Turns out most especially private.

"My Fame's accoucheur sadly yields his Place up to the Deputy Cor'ner, For my Public Opinion was Fields's, My tradewind a puff from the 'Corner.'"

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