THE VISION OF SIR LAUNFAL

AND OTHER POEMS

BY

JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL

EDITED WITH AN INTRODUCTION AND NOTES BY
JULIAN W. ABERNETHY, PH.D., PRINCIPAL OF
THE BERKELEY INSTITUTE, BROOKLYN, N.Y.

Merrill’s English Texts

NEW YORK

CHARLES E. MERRILL CO.

44-60 East Twenty-third Street

Copyright, 1908, by Charles E. Merrill Co.

[3]

PREFACE

The aim of this edition of the Vision of Sir Launfal is to furnish
the material that must be used in any adequate treatment of the poem
in the class room, and to suggest other material that may be used in
the more leisurely and fruitful method of study that is sometimes
possible in spite of the restrictions of arbitrary courses of study.

In interpreting the poem with young students, special emphasis should
be given to the ethical significance, the broad appeal to human
sympathy and the sense of a common brotherhood of men, an appeal that
is in accord with the altruistic tendencies of the present time; to
the intimate appreciation and love of nature expressed in the poem,
feelings also in accord with the present movement of cultured minds
toward the natural world; to the lofty and inspiring idealism of
Lowell, as revealed in the poems included in this volume and in his
biography, and also as contrasted with current materialism; and,
finally, to the romantic sources of the story in the legends of King
Arthur and his table round, a region of literary delight too generally
unknown to present-day students.[4]

After these general topics, it is assumed that such matters as
literary structure and poetic beauty will receive due attention. If
the technical faults of the poem, which critics are at much pains to
point out, are not discovered by the student, his knowledge will be
quite as profitable. Additional reading in Lowell’s works should be
secured, and can be through the sympathetic interest and enthusiasm of
the instructor. The following selections may be used for rapid
examination and discussion: Under the Willows, The First Snow-Fall,
Under the Old Elm, Auf Wiedersehen, Sunthin’ in the Pastoral Line,
Jonathan to John, Mr. Hosea Biglow to the Editor of the Atlantic
Monthly, and the prose essays My Garden Acquaintance and A Good
Word for Winter. The opportunity should not be lost for making the
students forever and interestedly acquainted with Lowell, with the
poet and the man.

The editor naturally does not assume responsibility for the character
of the examination questions given, at the end of this volume. They
are questions that have been used in recent years in college entrance
papers by two eminent examination boards.

J.W.A.

October 1, 1908.

[5]

CONTENTS

[7]

INTRODUCTION

LIFE OF LOWELL

In Cambridge there are two literary shrines to which visitors are sure
to find their way soon after passing the Harvard gates, “Craigie
House,” the home of Longfellow and “Elmwood,” the home of Lowell.
Though their hallowed retirement has been profaned by the
encroachments of the growing city, yet in their simple dignity these
fine old colonial mansions still bespeak the noble associations of the
past, and stand as memorials of the finest products of American
culture.

Elmwood was built before the Revolution by Thomas Oliver, the Tory
governor, who signed his abdication at the invitation of a committee
of “about four thousand people” who surrounded his house at Cambridge.
The property was confiscated by the Commonwealth and used by the
American army during the war. In 1818 it was purchased by the Rev.
Charles Lowell, pastor of the West Congregational Church in Boston,
and after ninety years it is still the family home. Here was born,
February 22, 1819, James Russell Lowell, with surroundings most
propitious for the nurturing of a poet-soul. Within the stately home
there was a refined family life; the father had profited by the
unusual privilege of three years’ study abroad, and his library of
some four thousand volumes was not limited to theology; the mother,
whose maiden name was Spence and who traced her Scotch ancestry back
to the hero of the ballad of Sir Patrick Spens, taught her children
the good old ballads[8] and the romantic stories in the Fairie Queen,
and it was one of the poet’s earliest delights to recount the
adventures of Spenser’s heroes and heroines to his playmates.

An equally important influence upon his early youth was the
out-of-door life at Elmwood. To the love of nature his soul was early
dedicated, and no American poet has more truthfully and beautifully
interpreted the inspired teachings of nature, whispered through the
solemn tree-tops or caroled by the happy birds. The open fields
surrounding Elmwood and the farms for miles around were his familiar
playground, and furnished daily adventures for his curious and eager
mind. The mere delight of this experience with nature, he says, “made
my childhood the richest part of my life. It seems to me as if I had
never seen nature again since those old days when the balancing of a
yellow butterfly over a thistle bloom was spiritual food and lodging
for a whole forenoon.” In the Cathedral is an autobiographic passage
describing in a series of charming pictures some of those choice hours
of childhood:

Quite like other boys Lowell was subjected to the processes of the
more formal education of books. He was first sent to a “dame school,”
and then to the private school of William Wells, under whose rigid
tuition he became thoroughly grounded in the classics. Among his
schoolfellows was W.W. Story, the poet-sculptor, who continued his
life-long friend. Thomas Wentworth Higginson, who was one of the
younger boys of the school, recalls the high talk of Story and Lowell
about the Fairie Queen. At fifteen he entered Harvard College, then
an[9] institution with about two hundred students. The course of study
in those days was narrow and dull, a pretty steady diet of Greek,
Latin and Mathematics, with an occasional dessert of Paley’s
Evidences of Christianity or Butler’s Analogy. Lowell was not
distinguished for scholarship, but he read omnivorously and wrote
copiously, often in smooth flowing verse, fashioned after the accepted
English models of the period. He was an editor of Harvardiana, the
college magazine, and was elected class poet in his senior year. But
his habit of lounging with the poets in the secluded alcoves of the
old library, in preference to attending recitations, finally became
too scandalous for official forbearance, and he was rusticated, “on
account of constant neglect of his college duties,” as the faculty
records state. He was sent to Concord, where his exile was not without
mitigating profit, as he became acquainted with Emerson and Thoreau.
Here he wrote the class poem, which he was permitted to circulate in
print at his Commencement. This production, which now stands at the
head of the list of his published works, was curiously unprophetic of
his later tendencies. It was written in the neatly, polished couplets
of the Pope type and other imitative metres, and aimed to satirize the
radical movements of the period, especially the transcendentalists and
abolitionists, with both of whom he was soon to be in active sympathy.

Lowell’s first two years out of college were troubled with rather more
than the usual doubts and questionings that attend a young man’s
choice of a profession. He studied for a bachelor’s degree in law,
which he obtained in two years. But the work was done reluctantly. Law
books, he says, “I am reading with as few wry faces as I may.” Though
he was nominally practicing law for two years, there is no evidence
that he ever had a client, except the fictitious one so pleasantly
described in his first magazine article, entitled My First Client.[10]
From Coke and Blackstone his mind would inevitably slip away to hold
more congenial communion with the poets. He became intensely
interested in the old English dramatists, an interest that resulted in
his first series of literary articles, The Old English Dramatists,
published in the Boston Miscellany. The favor with which these
articles were received increased, he writes, the “hope of being able
one day to support myself by my pen, and to leave a calling which I
hate, and for which I am not well fitted, to say the least.”

During this struggle between law and literature an influence came into
Lowell’s life that settled his purposes, directed his aspirations and
essentially determined his career. In 1839 he writes to a friend about
a “very pleasant young lady,” who “knows more poetry than any one I am
acquainted with.” This pleasant young lady was Maria White, who became
his wife in 1844. The loves of this young couple constitute one of the
most pleasing episodes in the history of our literature, idyllic in
its simple beauty and inspiring in its spiritual perfectness. “Miss
White was a woman of unusual loveliness,” says Mr. Norton, “and of
gifts of mind and heart still more unusual, which enabled her to enter
with complete sympathy into her lover’s intellectual life and to
direct his genius to its highest aims.” She was herself a poet, and a
little volume of her poems published privately after her death is an
evidence of her refined intellectual gifts and lofty spirit.

In 1841 Lowell published his first collection of poems, entitled A
Year’s Life. The volume was dedicated to “Una,” a veiled admission of
indebtedness for its inspiration to Miss White. Two poems
particularly, Irene and My Love, and the best in the volume, are
rapturous expressions of his new inspiration. In later years he
referred to the collection as “poor windfalls of unripe experience.”
Only nine of the sixty-eight poems were[11] preserved in subsequent
collections. In 1843, with a young friend, Robert Carter, Lowell
launched a new magazine, The Pioneer, with the high purpose, as the
prospectus stated, of giving the public “a rational substitute” for
the “namby-pamby love tales and sketches monthly poured out to them by
many of our popular magazines.” These young reformers did not know how
strongly the great reading public is attached to its literary
flesh-pots, and so the Pioneer proved itself too good to live in
just three months. The result of the venture to Lowell was an
interesting lesson in editorial work and a debt of eighteen hundred
dollars. His next venture was a second volume of Poems, issued in
1844, in which the permanent lines of his poetic development appear
more clearly than in A Year’s Life. The tone of the first volume was
uniformly serious, but in the second his muse’s face begins to
brighten with the occasional play of wit and humor. The volume was
heartily praised by the critics and his reputation as a new poet of
convincing distinction was established. In the following year appeared
Conversations on Some of the Old Poets, a volume of literary
criticism interesting now mainly as pointing to maturer work in this
field.

It is generally stated that the influence of Maria White made Lowell
an Abolitionist, but this is only qualifiedly true. A year before he
had met her he wrote to a friend: “The Abolitionists are the only ones
with whom I sympathize of the present extant parties.” Freedom,
justice, humanitarianism were fundamental to his native idealism.
Maria White’s enthusiasm and devotion to the cause served to
crystallize his sentiments and to stimulate him to a practical
participation in the movement. Both wrote for the Liberty Bell, an
annual published in the interests of the anti-slavery agitation.
Immediately after their marriage they went to Philadelphia where
Lowell for a time was an editorial writer[12] for the Pennsylvania
Freeman, an anti-slavery journal once edited by Whittier. During the
next six years he was a regular contributor to the Anti-Slavery
Standard, published in New York. In all of this prose writing Lowell
exhibited the ardent spirit of the reformer, although he never adopted
the extreme views of Garrison and others of the ultra-radical wing of
the party.

But Lowell’s greatest contribution to the anti-slavery cause was the
Biglow Papers, a series of satirical poems in the Yankee dialect,
aimed at the politicians who were responsible for the Mexican War, a
war undertaken, as he believed, in the interests of the Southern
slaveholders. Hitherto the Abolitionists had been regarded with
contempt by the conservative, complacent advocates of peace and
“compromise,” and to join them was essentially to lose caste in the
best society. But now a laughing prophet had arisen whose tongue was
tipped with fire. The Biglow Papers was an unexpected blow to the
slave power. Never before had humor been used directly as a weapon in
political warfare. Soon the whole country was ringing with the homely
phrases of Hosea Biglow’s satiric humor, and deriding conservatism
began to change countenance. “No speech, no plea, no appeal,” says
George William Curtis, “was comparable in popular and permanent effect
with this pitiless tempest of fire and hail, in the form of wit,
argument, satire, knowledge, insight, learning, common-sense, and
patriotism. It was humor of the purest strain, but humor in deadly
earnest.” As an embodiment of the elemental Yankee character and
speech it is a classic of final authority. Says Curtis, “Burns did not
give to the Scotch tongue a nobler immortality than Lowell gave to the
dialect of New England.”

The year 1848 was one of remarkably productive results for Lowell.
Besides the Biglow Papers and some forty magazine articles and
poems, he published a third[13] collection of Poems, the Vision of Sir
Launfal, and the Fable for Critics. The various phases of his
composite genius were nearly all represented in these volumes. The
Fable was a good-natured satire upon his fellow authors, in which he
touched up in rollicking rhymed couplets the merits and weaknesses of
each, not omitting himself, with witty characterization and acute
critical judgment; and it is still read for its delicious humor and
sterling criticism. For example, the lines on Poe will always be
quoted:

And so the sketch of Hawthorne:

Lowell was now living in happy content at Elmwood. His father, whom he
once speaks of as a “Dr. Primrose in the comparative degree,” had lost
a large portion of his property, and literary journals in those days
sent very small checks to young authors. So humble frugality was an
attendant upon the high thinking of the poet couple, but this did not
matter, since the richest objects of their ideal world could be had
without price. But clouds suddenly gathered over their beautiful
lives. Four children were born, three of whom died in infancy.
Lowell’s deep and lasting grief for his first-born is tenderly
recorded in the poems She Came and Went and the First Snow-Fall.
The volume of poems published in 1848 was “reverently dedicated” to
the memory of “our little Blanche,” and in the introductory poem
addressed “To[14] M.W.L.” he poured forth his sorrow like a libation of
tears:

The year 1851-52 was spent abroad for the benefit of Mrs. Lowell’s
health, which was now precarious. At Rome their little son Walter
died, and one year after their return to Elmwood sorrow’s crown of
sorrow came to the poet in the death of Mrs. Lowell, October, 1853.
For years after the dear old home was to him The Dead House, as he
wrote of it:

Before 1854 Lowell’s literary success had been won mainly in verse.
With the appearance in the magazines of A Moosehead Journal,
Fireside Travels, and Leaves from My Italian Journal his success
as a prose essayist began. Henceforth, and against his will, his prose
was a stronger literary force than his poetry. He now gave a course of
lectures on the English poets at the Lowell Institute, and during the
progress of these lectures he received notice of his appointment to
succeed Longfellow in the professorship of the French and Spanish
languages and Belles-Lettres in Harvard College. A year was spent in
Europe in preparation for his new work, and during the next twenty
years he faithfully performed the duties of the professorship, pouring
forth the ripening fruits of his varied studies in lectures such as it
is not often the privilege of college students to hear. That pulling[15]
in the yoke of this steady occupation was sometimes galling is shown
in his private letters. To W.D. Howells he wrote regretfully of the
time and energy given to teaching, and of his conviction that he would
have been a better poet if he “had not estranged the muse by donning a
professor’s gown.” But a good teacher always bears in his left hand
the lamp of sacrifice.

In 1857 Lowell was married to Miss Frances Dunlap, “a woman of
remarkable gifts and grace of person and character,” says Charles
Eliot Norton. In the same year the Atlantic Monthly was launched and
Lowell became its first editor. This position he held four years.
Under his painstaking and wise management the magazine quickly became
what it has continued to be, the finest representative of true
literature among periodicals. In 1864 he joined his friend, Professor
Norton, in the editorship of the North American Review, to which he
gave much of the distinction for which this periodical was once so
worthily famous. In this first appeared his masterly essays on the
great poets, Chaucer, Dante, Shakespeare, Spenser, Milton, Dryden, and
the others, which were gathered into the three volumes, Among My
Books, first and second series, and My Study Windows. Variety was
given to this critical writing by such charming essays as A Good Word
for Winter and the deliciously caustic paper On a Certain
Condescension in Foreigners.

One of the strongest elements of Lowell’s character was patriotism.
His love of country and his native soil was not merely a principle, it
was a passion. No American author has done so much to enlarge and
exalt the ideals of democracy. An intense interest in the welfare of
the nation broadened the scope of his literary work and led him at
times into active public life. During the Civil War he published a
second series of Biglow Papers, in which, says Mr. Greenslet, “we
feel the vital stirring of the mind of Lowell as it was moved by the
great war;[16] and if they never had quite the popular reverberation of
the first series, they made deeper impression, and are a more
priceless possession of our literature.” When peace was declared in
April, 1865, he wrote to Professor Norton: “The news, my dear Charles,
is from Heaven. I felt a strange and tender exaltation. I wanted to
laugh and I wanted to cry, and ended by holding my peace and feeling
devoutly thankful. There is something magnificent in having a country
to love.” On July 21 a solemn service was held at Harvard College in
memory of her sons who had died in the war, in which Lowell gave the
Commemoration Ode, a poem which is now regarded, not as popular, but
as marking the highest reach of his poetic power. The famous passage
characterizing Lincoln is unquestionably the finest tribute ever paid
to Lincoln by an American author.

In the presidential campaign of 1876 Lowell was active, making
speeches, serving as delegate to the Republican Convention, and later
as Presidential Elector. There was even much talk of sending him to
Congress. Through the friendly offices of Mr. Howells, who was in
intimate personal relations with President Hayes, he was appointed
Minister to Spain. This honor was the more gratifying to him because
he had long been devoted to the Spanish literature and language, and
he could now read his beloved Calderon with new joys. In 1880 he was
promoted to the English mission, and during the next four years
represented his country at the Court of St. James in a manner that
raised him to the highest point of honor and esteem in both nations.
His career in England was an extraordinary, in most respects an
unparalleled success. He was our first official representative to win
completely the heart of the English people, and a great part of his
permanent achievement was to establish more cordial relations between
the two countries. His literary reputation had prepared the ground[17]
for his personal popularity. He was greeted as “His Excellency the
Ambassador of American Literature to the Court of Shakespeare.” His
fascinating personality won friends in every circle of society. Queen
Victoria declared that during her long reign no ambassador had created
so much interest or won so much regard. He had already been honored by
degrees from Oxford and Cambridge, and now many similar honors were
thrust upon him. He was acknowledged to be the best after-dinner
speaker in England, and no one was called upon so often for addresses
at dedications, the unveiling of tablets, and other civic occasions.
It is not strange that he became attached to England with an
increasing affection, but there was no diminution of his intense
Americanism. His celebrated Birmingham address on Democracy is yet
our clearest and noblest exposition of American political principles
and ideals.

With the inauguration of Cleveland in 1885 Lowell’s official residence
in England came to an end. He returned to America and for a time lived
with his daughter at Deerfoot Farm. Mrs. Lowell had died in England,
and he could not carry his sorrow back to Elmwood alone. He now
leisurely occupied himself with literary work, making an occasional
address upon literature or politics, which was always distinguished by
grace and dignity of style and richness of thought.

In November, 1886, he delivered the oration at the 250th anniversary
of the founding of Harvard University, and, rising to the requirements
of this notable occasion, he captivated his hearers, among whom were
many distinguished delegates from the great universities of Europe as
well as of America, by the power of his thought and the felicity of
his expression.

During the period of his diplomatic service he added almost nothing to
his permanent literary product. In 1869 he had published Under the
Willows, a collection[18] that contains some of his finest poems. In the
same year The Cathedral was published, a stately poem in blank
verse, profound in thought, with many passages of great poetic beauty.
In 1888 a final collection of poems was published, entitled
Heartsease and Rue, which opened with the memorial poem, Agassiz,
an elegy that would not be too highly honored by being bound in a
golden volume with Lycidas, Adonais and Thyrsis. Going back to
his earliest literary studies, he again (1887) lectured at the Lowell
Institute on the old dramatists, Occasionally he gave a poem to the
magazines and a collection of these Last Poems was made in 1895 by
Professor Norton. During these years were written many of the charming
Letters to personal friends, which rank with the finest literary
letters ever printed and must always be regarded as an important part
of his prose works.

It was a gracious boon of providence that Lowell was permitted to
spend his last years at Elmwood, with his daughter, Mrs. Burnett, and
his grandchildren. There again, as in the early days, he watched the
orioles building their nests and listened to the tricksy catbird’s
call. To an English friend he writes: “I watch the moon rise behind
the same trees through which I first saw it seventy years ago and have
a strange feeling of permanence, as if I should watch it seventy years
longer.” In the old library by the familiar fireplace he sat, when the
shadows were playing among his beloved books, communing with the
beautiful past. What unwritten poems of pathos and sweetness may have
ministered to his great soul we cannot know. In 1890 a fatal disease
came upon him, and after long and heroic endurance of pain he died,
August 12, 1891, and under the trees of Mt. Auburn he rests, as in
life still near his great neighbor Longfellow. In a memorial poem
Oliver Wendell Holmes spoke for the thousands who mourned:[19]

Lowell’s rich and varied personality presents a type of cultured
manhood that is the finest product of American democracy. The
largeness of his interests and the versatility of his intellectual
powers give him a unique eminence among American authors. His genius
was undoubtedly embarrassed by the diffusive tendency of his
interests. He might have been a greater poet had he been less the
reformer and statesman, and his creative impulses were often absorbed
in the mere enjoyment of exercising his critical faculty. Although he
achieved only a qualified eminence as poet, or as prose writer, yet
because of the breadth and variety of his permanent achievement he
must be regarded as our greatest man of letters. His sympathetic
interest, always outflowing toward concrete humanity, was a quality—

With marvelous versatility and equal ease he could talk with the
down-east farmer and salty seamen and exchange elegant compliments
with old world royalty. In The Cathedral he says significantly:

In the delightful little poem, The Nightingale in the Study, we have
a fanciful expression of the conflict between Lowell’s love of books
and love of nature. His friend the catbird calls him “out beneath the
unmastered sky,” where the buttercups “brim with wine beyond all
Lesbian juice.” But there are ampler skies, he answers, “in Fancy’s
land,” and the singers though dead so long—

His love of reading is manifest in all his work, giving to his style a
bookishness that is sometimes excessive and often troublesome. His
expression, though generally direct and clear, and happily colored by
personal frankness, is often burdened with learning. To be able to
read his essays with full appreciation is in itself evidence of a
liberal education. His scholarship was broad and profound, but it was
not scholarship in the German sense, exhaustive and exhausting. He
studied for the joy of knowing, never for the purpose of being known,
and he cared more to know the spirit and meaning of things than to
know their causes and origins. A language he learned for the sake of
its literature rather than its philology. As Mr. Brownell observes, he
shows little interest in the large movements of the world’s history.
He seemed to prefer history as sublimated in the poet’s song. The
field of belles-lettres was his native province; its atmosphere was
most congenial to his tastes. In book-land it was always June for
him—

But books could never divert his soul from its early endearments with
out-of-door nature. “The older I[21] grow,” he says, “the more I am
convinced that there are no satisfactions so deep and so permanent as
our sympathies with outward nature.” And in the preface to My Study
Windows he speaks of himself as “one who has always found his most
fruitful study in the open air.” The most charming element of his
poetry is the nature element that everywhere cheers and stimulates the
reader. It is full of sunshine and bird music. So genuine, spontaneous
and sympathetic are his descriptions that we feel the very heart
throbs of nature in his verse, and in the prose of such records of
intimacies with outdoor friends as the essay, My Garden
Acquaintance. “How I do love the earth,” he exclaims. “I feel it
thrill under my feet. I feel somehow as if it were conscious of my
love, as if something passed into my dancing blood from it.” It is
this sensitive nearness to nature that makes him a better interpreter
of her “visible forms” than Bryant even; moreover, unlike Bryant he
always catches the notes of joy in nature’s voices and feels the
uplift of a happy inspiration.

In the presence of the immense popularity of Mark Twain, it may seem
paradoxical to call Lowell our greatest American humorist. Yet in the
refined and artistic qualities of humorous writing and in the
genuineness of the native flavor his work is certainly superior to any
other humorous writing that is likely to compete with it for permanent
interest. Indeed, Mr. Greenslet thinks that “it is as the author of
the Biglow Papers that he is likely to be longest remembered.” The
perpetual play of humor gave to his work, even to the last, the
freshness of youth. We love him for his boyish love of pure fun. The
two large volumes of his Letters are delicious reading because he
put into them “good wholesome nonsense,” as he says, “keeping my
seriousness to bore myself with.”

But this sparkling and overflowing humor never ob[22]scures the deep
seriousness that is the undercurrent of all his writing. A high
idealism characterizes all his work. One of his greatest services to
his country was the effort to create a saner and sounder political
life. As he himself realized, he often moralized his work too much
with a purposeful idealism. In middle life he said, “I shall never be
a poet until I get out of the pulpit, and New England was all
meeting-house when I was growing up.” In religion and philosophy he
was conservative, deprecating the radical and scientific tendencies of
the age, with its knife and glass—

The moral impulse and the poetic impulse were often in conflict, and
much of his early poetry for this reason was condemned by his later
judgment. His maturer poems are filled with deep-thoughted lines,
phrases of high aspiration and soul-stirring ecstasies. Though his
thought is spiritual and ideal, it is always firmly rooted in the
experience of common humanity. All can climb the heights with him and
catch inspiring glimpses at least of the ideal and the infinite.

CRITICAL APPRECIATIONS

“The proportion of his poetry that can be so called is small. But a
great deal of it is very fine, very noble, and at times very
beautiful, and it discloses the distinctly poetic faculty of which
rhythmic and figurative is native expression. It is impressionable
rather than imaginative in the large sense; it is felicitous in detail
rather than in design; and of a general rather than individual, a
representative rather than original, inspiration. There is a field of
poetry, assuredly not the highest, but ample and admirable—in which
[23]
these qualities, more or less unsatisfactory in prose, are
legitimately and fruitfully exercised. All poetry is in the realm of
feeling, and thus less exclusively dependent on the thought that is
the sole reliance of prose. Being genuine poetry, Lowell’s profits by
this advantage. Feeling is fitly, genuinely, its inspiration. Its
range and limitations correspond to the character of his
susceptibility, as those of his prose do to that of his thought. The
fusion of the two in the crucible of the imagination is infrequent
with him, because with him it is the fancy rather than the imagination
that is luxuriant and highly developed. For the architectonics of
poetry he had not the requisite reach and grasp, the comprehensive and
constructing vision. Nothing of his has any large design or effective
interdependent proportions. In a technical way an exception should be
noted in his skilful building of the ode—a form in which he was
extremely successful and for which he evidently had a native aptitude
… Lowell’s constitutes, on the whole, the most admirable American
contribution to the nature poetry of English literature—far beyond
that of Bryant, Whittier, or Longfellow, I think, and only
occasionally excelled here and there by the magic touch of
Emerson.”—W. C. Brownell, in Scribner’s Magazine, February,
1907.

“Lowell is a poet who seems to represent New England more variously
than either of his comrades. We find in his work, as in theirs, her
loyalty and moral purpose. She has been at cost for his training, and
he in turn has read her heart, honoring her as a mother before the
world, and seeing beauty in her common garb and speech…. If Lowell
be not first of all an original genius, I know not where to look for
one. Judged by his personal bearing, who is brighter, more persuasive,
more equal to the occasion than himself,—less open to Doudan’s[24]
stricture upon writers who hoard and store up their thoughts for the
betterment of their printed works? Lowell’s treasury can stand the
drafts of both speech and composition. Judged by his works, as a poet
in the end must be, he is one who might gain by revision and
compression. But think, as is his due, upon the high-water marks of
his abundant tide, and see how enviable the record of a poet who is
our most brilliant and learned critic, and who has given us our best
native idyll, our best and most complete work in dialectic verse, and
the noblest heroic ode that America has produced—each and all ranking
with the first of their kinds in English literature of the modern
time.”—Edmund Clarence Stedman.

“As a racy humorist and a brilliant wit using verse as an instrument
of expression, he has no clear superior, probably no equal, so far at
least as American readers are concerned, among writers who have
employed the English language. As a satirist he has superiors, but
scarcely as an inventor of jeux d’esprit. As a patriotic lyrist he
has few equals and very few superiors in what is probably the highest
function of such a poet—that of stimulating to a noble height the
national instincts of his countrymen…. The rest of his poetry may
fairly be said to gain on that of any of his American contemporaries
save Poe in more sensuous rhythm, in choicer diction, in a more
refined and subtilized imagination, and in a deeper, a more brooding
intelligence.”—Prof. William P. Trent.

“In originality, in virility, in many-sidedness, Lowell is the first
of American poets. He not only possessed, at times in nearly equal
measure, many of the qualities most notable in his fellow-poets,
rivaling Bryant as a painter of nature, and Holmes in pathos, having[25]
a touch too of Emerson’s transcendentalism, and rising occasionally to
Whittier’s moral fervor, but he brought to all this much beside. In
one vein he produced such a masterpiece of mingled pathos and nature
painting as we find in the tenth Biglow letter of the second series;
in another, such a lyric gem as The Fountain; in another, The First
Snow-Fall and After the Burial; in another, again, the noble
Harvard Commemoration Ode…. He had plainly a most defective ear
for rhythm and verbal harmony. Except when he confines himself to
simple metres, we rarely find five consecutive lines which do not in
some way jar on us. His blank verse and the irregular metres which he,
unfortunately, so often employs, have little or no music, and are
often quite intolerable. But after all the deductions which the most
exacting criticism can make, it still remains that, as a serious poet
Lowell stands high. As a painter of nature, he has, when at his best,
few superiors, and, in his own country, none. Whatever be their
esthetic and technical deficiencies, he has written many poems of
sentiment and pathos which can never fail to come home to all to whom
such poetry appeals. His hortatory and didactic poetry, as it
expresses itself in the Commemoration Ode, is worthy, if not of the
music and felicity of Milton and Wordsworth, at least of their tone,
when that tone is most exalted. As a humorist he is inimitable. His
humor is rooted in a fine sense of the becoming, and in a profounder
insight into the character of his countrymen than that of any other
American writer.”—John Churton Collins.

“He was a brilliant wit and a delightful humorist; a discursive
essayist of unfailing charm; the best American critic of his time; a
scholar of wide learning, deep also when his interest was most
engaged; a powerful writer on great public questions; a patriot
passionately pure; but first, last, and always he was a poet, never
so[26] happy as when he was looking at the world from the poet’s mount of
vision and seeking for fit words and musical to tell what he had seen.
But his emotion was not sufficiently ‘recollected in tranquillity.’
Had he been more an artist he would have been a better poet, for then
he would have challenged the invasions of his literary memory, his
humor, his animal spirits, within limits where they had no right of
way. If his humor was his rarest, it was his most dangerous gift; so
often did it tempt him to laugh out in some holy place…. Less
charming than Longfellow, less homely than Whittier, less artistic
than Holmes, less grave than Bryant, less vivid than Emerson, less
unique than Poe, his qualities, intellectual, moral and esthetic, in
their assemblage and coördination assign him to a place among American
men of letters which is only a little lower than that which is
Emerson’s and his alone.”—John White Chadwick.

THE VISION OF SIR LAUNFAL

Early in 1848 in a letter to his friend Briggs, Lowell speaks of The
Vision of Sir Launfal as “a sort of story, and more likely to be
popular than what I write generally. Maria thinks very highly of it.”
And in another letter he calls it “a little narrative poem.” In
December, 1848, it was published in a thin volume alone, and at once
justified the poet’s expectations of popularity. The poem was an
improvisation, like that of his “musing organist,” for it was written,
we are told, almost at a single sitting, entirely within two days. The
theme may have been suggested by Tennyson’s Sir Galahad, but his
familiarity with the old romances and his love of the mystical and
symbolic sense of these good old-time tales were a quite ample source
for such suggestion. Moreover Lowell in his early years was much given
[27]
to seeing visions and dreaming dreams. “During that part of my life,”
he says, “which I lived most alone, I was never a single night
unvisited by visions, and once I thought I had a personal revelation
from God Himself.” The Fairie Queen was “the first poem I ever
read,” he says, and the bosky glades of Elmwood were often transformed
into an enchanted forest where the Knight of the Red Cross, and Una
and others in medieval costume passed up and down before his wondering
eyes. This medieval romanticism was a perfectly natural accompaniment
of his intense idealism.

The Vision of Sir Launfal and the Fable for Critics, published in
the same year, illustrate the two dominant and strikingly contrasted
qualities of his nature, a contrast of opposites which he himself
clearly perceived. “I find myself very curiously compounded of two
utterly distinct characters. One half of me is clear mystic and
enthusiast, and the other, humorist,” and he adds that “it would have
taken very little to have made a Saint Francis” of him. It was the
Saint Francis of New England, the moral and spiritual enthusiast in
Lowell’s nature that produced the poem and gave it power. Thus we see
that notwithstanding its antique style and artificial structure, it
was a perfectly direct and spontaneous expression of himself.

The allegory of the Vision is easily interpreted, in its main
significance. There is nothing original in the lesson, the humility of
true charity, and it is a common criticism that the moral purpose of
the poem is lost sight of in the beautiful nature pictures. But a
knowledge of the events which were commanding Lowell’s attention at
this time and quickening his native feelings into purposeful utterance
gives to the poem a much deeper significance. In 1844, when the
discussion over the annexation of Texas was going on, he wrote The
Present Crisis, a noble appeal to his countrymen to im[28]prove and
elevate their principles. During the next four years he was writing
editorially for the Standard, the official organ of the Anti-Slavery
Society, at the same time he was bringing out the Biglow Papers. In
all these forms of expression he voiced constantly the sentiment of
reform, which now filled his heart like a holy zeal. The national
disgrace of slavery rested heavily upon his soul. He burned with the
desire to make God’s justice prevail where man’s justice had failed.
In 1846 he said in a letter, “It seems as if my heart would break in
pouring out one glorious song that should be the gospel of Reform,
full of consolation and strength to the oppressed, yet falling gently
and restoringly as dew on the withered youth-flowers of the oppressor.
That way my madness lies, if any.” This passionate yearning for reform
is embodied poetically in the Vision. In a broad sense, therefore,
the poem is an expression of ideal democracy, in which equality,
sympathy, and a sense of the common brotherhood of man are the basis
of all ethical actions and standards. It is the Christ-like conception
of human society that is always so alluring in the poetry and so
discouraging in the prose of life.

The following explanation appeared in the early editions of the poem
as an introductory note:

In the last sentence there is a sly suggestion of Lowell’s
playfulness. Of course every one may compete in the search for the
Grail, and the “time subsequent to King Arthur’s reign” includes the
present time. The Romance of King Arthur is the Morte Darthur of Sir
Thomas Malory. Lowell’s specific indebtedness to the medieval romances
extended only to the use of the symbol of consecration to some noble
purpose in the search for the Grail, and to the name of his hero. It
is a free version of older French romances belonging to the Arthurian
cycle. Sir Launfal is the title of a poem written by Sir Thomas
Chestre in the reign of Henry VI, which may be found in Ritson’s
Ancient English Metrical Romances. There is nothing suggestive of
Lowell’s poem except the quality of generosity in the hero, who—

One of Lowell’s earlier poems, The Search, contains the germ of The
Vision of Sir Launfal. It represents a search for Christ, first in
nature’s fair woods and fields, then in the “proud world” amid “power
and wealth,” and the search finally ends in “a hovel rude” where[30]—

And Christ, the seeker learns, is not to be found by wandering through
the world.

A similar fancy also is embodied in a little poem entitled A
Parable. Christ goes through the world to see “How the men, my
brethren, believe in me,” and he finds “in church, and palace, and
judgment-hall,” a disregard for the primary principles of his
teaching.

These early poems and passages in others written at about the same
time, taken in connection with the Vision, show how strongly the
theme had seized upon Lowell’s mind.

The structure of the poem is complicated and sometimes confusing. At
the outset the student must notice that there is a story within a
story. The action of the major story covers only a single night, and
the hero of this story is the real Sir Launfal, who in his sleep
dreams the minor story, the Vision. The action of this story covers
the lifetime of the hero, the imaginary Sir Launfal, from early
manhood to old age, and includes his wanderings in distant lands. The
poem is constructed on the principles of contrast and parallelism. By
holding to this method of structure throughout Lowell sacrificed the
important artistic element of unity, especially[31] in breaking the
narrative with the Prelude to the second part. The first Prelude
describing the beauty and inspiring joy of spring, typifying the
buoyant youth and aspiring soul of Sir Launfal, corresponds to the
second Prelude, describing the bleakness and desolation of winter,
typifying the old age and desolated life of the hero. But beneath the
surface of this wintry age there is a new soul of summer beauty, the
warm love of suffering humanity, just as beneath the surface of the
frozen brook there is an ice-palace of summer beauty. In Part First
the gloomy castle with its joyless interior stands as the only cold
and forbidding thing in the landscape, “like an outpost of winter;” so
in Part Second the same castle with Christmas joys within is the only
bright and gladsome object in the landscape. In Part First the castle
gates never “might opened be”; in Part Second the “castle gates stand
open now.” And thus the student may find various details contrasted
and paralleled. The symbolic meaning must be kept constantly in mind,
or it will escape unobserved; for example, the cost of earthly things
in comparison with the generosity of June corresponds to the churlish
castle opposed to the inviting warmth of summer; and each symbolizes
the proud, selfish, misguided heart of Sir Launfal in youth, in
comparison with the humility and large Christian charity in old age.
The student should search for these symbolic hints, passages in which
“more is meant than meets the ear,” but if he does not find all that
the poet may or may not have intended in his dreamy design, there need
be no detraction from the enjoyment of the poem.

Critical judgment upon The Vision of Sir Launfal is generally severe
in respect to its structural faults. Mr. Greenslet declares that
“through half a century, nine readers out of ten have mistaken
Lowell’s meaning,” even the “numerous commentators” have “interpreted[32]
the poem as if the young knight actually adventured the quest and
returned from it at the end of years, broken and old.” This, however,
must be regarded as a rather exaggerated estimate of the lack of unity
and consistency in the poem. Stedman says: “I think that The Vision
of Sir Launfal owed its success quite as much to a presentation of
nature as to its misty legend. It really is a landscape poem, of which
the lovely passage, ‘And what is so rare as a day in June?’ and the
wintry prelude to Part Second, are the specific features.” And the
English critic, J. Churton Collins, thinks that “Sir Launfal, except
for the beautiful nature pictures, scarcely rises above the level of
an Ingoldsby Legend.”

The popular judgment of the poem (which after all is the important
judgment) is fairly stated by Mr. Greenslet: “There is probably no
poem in American literature in which a visionary faculty like that [of
Lowell] is expressed with such a firm command of poetic background and
variety of music as in Sir Launfal … its structure is far from
perfect; yet for all that it has stood the searching test of time: it
is beloved now by thousands of young American readers, for whom it has
been a first initiation to the beauty of poetic idealism.”

While studying The Vision of Sir Launfal the student should be made
familiar with Tennyson’s Sir Galahad and The Holy Grail, and the
libretto of Wagner’s Parsifal. Also Henry A. Abbey’s magnificent
series of mural paintings in the Boston Public Library, representing
the Quest of the Holy Grail, may be utilized in the Copley Prints.
If possible the story of Sir Galahad’s search for the Grail in the
seventeenth book of Sir Thomas Malory’s Morte Darthur should be
read. It would be well also to read Longfellow’s King Robert of
Sicily, which to some extent presents a likeness of motive and
treatment.

[33]

THE COMMEMORATION ODE

In April, 1865, the Civil War was ended and peace was declared. On
July 21 Harvard College held a solemn service in commemoration of her
ninety-three sons who had been killed in the war. Eight of these
fallen young heroes were of Lowell’s own kindred. Personal grief thus
added intensity to the deep passion of his utterance upon this great
occasion. He was invited to give a poem, and the ode which he
presented proved to be the supreme event of the noble service. The
scene is thus described by Francis H. Underwood, who was in the
audience:

“The services took place in the open air, in the presence of a great
assembly. Prominent among the speakers were Major-General Meade, the
hero of Gettysburg, and Major-General Devens. The wounds of the war
were still fresh and bleeding, and the interest of the occasion was
deep and thrilling. The summer afternoon was drawing to its close when
the poet began the recital of the ode. No living audience could for
the first time follow with intelligent appreciation the delivery of
such a poem. To be sure, it had its obvious strong points and its
sonorous charms; but, like all the later poems of the author, it is
full of condensed thought and requires study. The reader to-day finds
many passages whose force and beauty escaped him during the recital,
but the effect of the poem at the time was overpowering. The face of
the poet, always singularly expressive, was on this occasion almost
transfigured—glowing, as if with an inward light. It was impossible
to look away from it. Our age has furnished many great historic
scenes, but this Commemoration combined the elements of grandeur and
pathos, and produced an impression as lasting as life.”

Of the delivery and immediate effect of the poem Mr.[34] Greenslet says:
“Some in the audience were thrilled and shaken by it, as Lowell
himself was shaken in its delivery, yet he seems to have felt with
some reason that it was not a complete and immediate success. Nor is
this cause for wonder. The passion of the poem was too ideal, its
woven harmonies too subtle to be readily communicated to so large an
audience, mastered and mellowed though it was by a single deep mood.
Nor was Lowell’s elocution quite that of the deep-mouthed odist
capable of interpreting such organ tones of verse. But no sooner was
the poem published, with the matchless Lincoln strophe inserted, than
its greatness and nobility were manifest.”

The circumstances connected with the writing of the ode have been
described by Lowell in his private letters. It appears that he was
reluctant to undertake the task, and for several weeks his mind
utterly refused to respond to the high duty put upon it. At last the
sublime thought came to him upon the swift wings of inspiration. “The
ode itself,” he says, “was an improvisation. Two days before the
commemoration I had told my friend Child that it was impossible—that
I was dull as a door-mat. But the next day something gave me a jog,
and the whole thing came out of me with a rush. I sat up all night
writing it out clear, and took it on the morning of the day to Child.”
In another letter he says: “The poem was written with a vehement
speed, which I thought I had lost in the skirts of my professor’s
gown. Till within two days of the celebration I was hopelessly dumb,
and then it all came with a rush, literally making me lean (mi fece
magro), and so nervous that I was weeks in getting over it.” In a note
in Scudder’s biography of Lowell (Vol. II., p. 65), it is stated upon
the authority of Mrs. Lowell that the poem was begun at ten o’clock
the night before the commemoration day, and finished at four o’clock
in the morning. “She opened her eyes[35] to see him standing haggard,
actually wasted by the stress of labor and the excitement which had
carried him through a poem full of passion and fire, of five hundred
and twenty-three lines, in the space of six hours.”

Critical estimates are essentially in accord as to the deep
significance and permanent poetic worth of this poem. Greenslet, the
latest biographer of Lowell, says that the ode, “if not his most
perfect, is surely his noblest and most splendid work,” and adds:
“Until the dream of human brotherhood is forgotten, the echo of its
large music will not wholly die away.” Professor Beers declares it to
be, “although uneven, one of the finest occasional poems in the
language, and the most important contribution which our Civil War has
made to song.” Of its exalted patriotism, George William Curtis says:
“The patriotic heart of America throbs forever in Lincoln’s Gettysburg
address. But nowhere in literature is there a more magnificent and
majestic personification of a country whose name is sacred to its
children, nowhere a profounder passion of patriotic loyalty, than in
the closing lines of the Commemoration Ode. The American whose heart,
swayed by that lofty music, does not thrill and palpitate with solemn
joy and high resolve does not yet know what it is to be an American.”

With the praise of a discriminating criticism Stedman discusses the
ode in his Poets of America: “Another poet would have composed a
less unequal ode; no American could have glorified it with braver
passages, with whiter heat, with language and imagery so befitting
impassioned thought. Tried by the rule that a true poet is at his best
with the greatest theme, Lowell’s strength is indisputable. The ode is
no smooth-cut verse from Pentelicus, but a mass of rugged quartz,
beautiful with prismatic crystals, and deep veined here and there with
virgin gold. The early strophes, though opening with a fine abrupt
line, ‘weak-winged is song,’ are scarcely[36] firm and incisive. Lowell
had to work up to his theme. In the third division, ‘Many loved Truth,
and lavished life’s best oil,’ he struck upon a new and musical
intonation of the tenderest thoughts. The quaver of this melodious
interlude carries the ode along, until the great strophe is reached,—

in which the man, Abraham Lincoln, whose death had but just closed the
national tragedy, is delineated in a manner that gives this poet a
preëminence, among those who capture likeness in enduring verse, that
we award to Velasquez among those who fasten it upon the canvas. ‘One
of Plutarch’s men’ is before us, face to face; an historic character
whom Lowell fully comprehended, and to whose height he reached in this
great strophe. Scarcely less fine is his tearful, yet transfiguring,
Avete to the sacred dead of the Commemoration. The weaker divisions of
the production furnish a background to these passages, and at the
close the poet rises with the invocation,—

a strain which shows that when Lowell determinedly sets his mouth to
the trumpet, the blast is that of Roncesvalles.”

W.C. Brownell, the latest critic of Lowell’s poetry, says of this
poem: “The ode is too long, its evolution is defective, it contains
verbiage, it preaches. But passages of it—the most famous having
characteristically been interpolated after its delivery—are equal to
anything of the kind. The temptation to quote from it is hard to
withstand. It is the cap-sheaf of Lowell’s achievement.” In this ode
“he reaches, if he does not throughout maintain, his own
‘clear-ethered height’ and his[37] verse has the elevation of ecstasy and
the splendor of the sublime.”

The versification of this poem should be studied with some
particularity. Of the forms of lyric expression the ode is the most
elaborate and dignified. It is adapted only to lofty themes and
stately occasions. Great liberty is allowed in the choice and
arrangement of its meter, rhymes, and stanzaic forms, that its varied
form and movement may follow the changing phases of the sentiment and
passion called forth by the theme. Lowell has given us an account of
his own consideration of this matter. “My problem,” he says, “was to
contrive a measure which should not be tedious by uniformity, which
should vary with varying moods, in which the transitions (including
those of the voice) should be managed without jar. I at first thought
of mixed rhymed and blank verses of unequal measures, like those in
the choruses of Samson Agonistes, which are in the main masterly. Of
course, Milton deliberately departed from that stricter form of Greek
chorus to which it was bound quite as much (I suspect) by the law of
its musical accompaniment as by any sense of symmetry. I wrote some
stanzas of the Commemoration Ode on this theory at first, leaving
some verses without a rhyme to match. But my ear was better pleased
when the rhyme, coming at a longer interval, as a far-off echo rather
than instant reverberation, produced the same effect almost, and yet
was gratified by unexpectedly recalling an association and faint
reminiscence of consonance.”

[39]

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Horace E. Scudder: James Russell Lowell: A Biography. 2 vols. The
standard biography.

Ferris Greenslet: James Russell Lowell: His Life and Work. The
latest biography (1905) and very satisfactory.

Francis H. Underwood: James Russell Lowell: A Biographical Sketch and
Lowell the Poet and the Man. Interesting recollections of a personal
friend and editorial associate.

Edward Everett Hale: Lowell and His Friends.

Edward Everett Hale, Jr.: James Russell Lowell. (Beacon
Biographies.)

Charles Eliot Norton: Letters of James Russell Lowell. 2 vols.
Invaluable and delightful.

Edmund Clarence Stedman: Poets of America.

W.C. Brownell: James Russell Lowell. (Scribner’s Magazine, February,
1907.) The most recent critical estimate.

George William Curtis: James Russell Lowell: An Address.

John Churton Collins. Studies in Poetry and Criticism, “Poetry and
Poets of America.” Excellent as an English estimate.

Barrett Wendell: Literary History of America and Stelligeri, “Mr.
Lowell as a Teacher.”

Henry James: Essays in London and Library of the World’s Best
Literature.

George E. Woodberry: Makers of Literature.

William Watson: Excursions in Criticism.

W.D. Howells: Literary Friends and Acquaintance.

Charles E. Richardson: American Literature.

M.A. DeWolfe Howe: American Bookmen.[40]

Thomas Wentworth Higginson: Old Cambridge.

Frank Preston Stearns: Cambridge Sketches. 1905.

Richard Burton: Literary Leaders of America. 1904.

John White Chadwick: Chambers’s Cyclopedia of English Literature.

Hamilton Wright Mabie: My Study Fire. Second Series, “Lowell’s
Letters.”

Margaret Fuller: Art, Literature and the Drama. 1859.

Richard Henry Stoddard: Recollections, Personal and Literary, “At
Lowell’s Fireside.”

Edwin P. Whipple: Outlooks on Society, Literature and Politics,
“Lowell as a Prose Writer.”

H.R. Haweis: American Humorists.

Bayard Taylor: Essays and Notes.

G.W. Smalley: London Letters, Vol. 1., “Mr. Lowell, why the English
liked him.”

THE POETS’ TRIBUTES TO LOWELL

Longfellow’s Herons of Elmwood; Whittier’s A Welcome to Lowell;
Holmes’s Farewell to Lowell, At a Birthday Festival, and To James
Russell Lowell; Aldrich’s Elmwood; Margaret J. Preston’s
Home-Welcome to Lowell; Richard Watson Gilder’s Lowell;
Christopher P. Cranch’s To J.R.L. on His Fiftieth Birthday, and To
J.R.L. on His Homeward Voyage; James Kenneth Stephen’s In Memoriam;
James Russell Lowell, “Lapsus Calami and Other Verses”; William W.
Story’s To James Russell Lowell, Blackwood’s Magazine, Vol. 150;
Eugene Field’s James Russell Lowell; Edith Thomas’s On Reading
Lowell’s “Heartsease and Rue.”

[41]

THE VISION OF SIR LAUNFAL

AND OTHER POEMS

THE VISION OF SIR LAUNFAL

PRELUDE TO PART FIRST

[46]

Part First

I.

II.

III.

IV.

V.

VI.

Prelude to Part Second

Part Second

I.

II.

III.

IV.

V.

VI.

[57]

VII.

VIII.

IX.

X.

THE SHEPHERD OF KING ADMETUS

AN INCIDENT IN A RAILROAD CAR

HEBE

TO THE DANDELION

MY LOVE

THE CHANGELING

AN INDIAN-SUMMER REVERIE

THE OAK

BEAVER BROOK

THE PRESENT CRISIS

THE COURTIN’

ODE RECITED AT THE HARVARD COMMEMORATION

JULY 21, 1865

I.

II.

III.

IV.

V.

VI.

VII.

VIII.

IX.

X.

XI.

[135]

NOTES

THE VISION OF SIR LAUNFAL

1. The Musing organist: There is a peculiar felicity in this musical
introduction. The poem is like an improvisation, and was indeed
composed much as a musician improvises, with swift grasp of the subtle
suggestions of musical tones. It is a dream, an elaborate and somewhat
tangled metaphor, full of hidden meaning for the accordant mind, and
the poet appropriately gives it a setting of music, the most symbolic
of all the arts. It is an allegory, like any one of the adventures in
the Fairie Queen, and from the very beginning the reader must be
alive to the symbolic meaning, upon which Lowell, unlike Spenser,
places chief emphasis, rather than upon the narrative. Compare the
similar musical device in Browning’s Abt Vogler and Adelaide
Proctor’s Lost Chord.

6. Theme: The theme, subject, or underlying thought of the poem is
expressed in line 12 below:

or more comprehensively in the group of four lines of which this is
the conclusion. The organist’s fingers wander listlessly over the keys
at first; then come forms and figures from out of dreamland over the
bridge of his careless melody, and gradually the vision takes
consistent and expressive shape. So the poet comes upon his central
subject, or theme, shaped from his wandering thought and imagination.

7. Auroral flushes: Like the first faint glimmerings of light in the
East that point out the pathway of the rising[136] sun, the uncertain,
wavering outlines of the poet’s vision precede the perfected theme
that is drawing near.

9. Not only around our infancy, etc.: The allusion is to
Wordsworth’s Ode on the Intimations of Immortality, especially these
lines:

As Lowell’s central theme is so intimately associated with that of
Wordsworth’s poem, if not directly suggested by it, the two poems
should be read together and compared. Lowell maintains that “heaven
lies about us” not only in our infancy, but at all times, if only we
have the soul to comprehend it.

12. We Sinais climb, etc.: Mount Sinai was the mountain in Arabia on
which Moses talked with God (Exodus xix, xx). God’s miracles are
taking place about us all the time, if only we can emancipate our
souls sufficiently to see them. From out of our materialized daily
lives we may rise at any moment, if we will, to ideal and spiritual
things. In a letter to his nephew Lowell says: “This same name of God
is written all over the world in little phenomena that occur under our
eyes every moment, and I confess that I feel very much inclined to
hang my head with Pizarro when I cannot translate those hieroglyphics
into my own vernacular.” (Letters, I, 164).[137]

Compare the following passage in the poem Bibliolatres:

15. Prophecies: Prophecy is not only prediction, but also any
inspired discourse or teaching. Compare the following lines from the
poem Freedom, written the same year:

At the end of this poem Lowell gives his view of “fallen and traitor
lives.” He speaks of the “boundless future” of our country—

While reading Sir Launfal the fact must be kept in mind that Lowell
was at the time of writing the poem filled with the spirit of freedom
and reform, and was writing fiery articles in prose for the
Anti-Slavery Standard, expressing his bitter indignation at the
indifference and lukewarmness of the Northern people on the subject of
slavery.

17. Druid wood: The Druids were the aged priests of the Celts, who
performed their religious ceremonies in the[138] forests, especially among
oaks, which were peculiarly sacred to them. Hence the venerable woods,
like the aged priests, offer their benediction. Every power of nature,
the winds, the mountain, the wood, the sea, has a symbolic meaning
which we should be able to interpret for our inspiration and
uplifting. Read Bryant’s A Forest Hymn.

18. Benedicite: An invocation of blessing. Imperative form of the
Latin benedicere, to bless. Longfellow speaks of the power of songs
that—

19-20. Compare these lines with the ninth strophe of Wordsworth’s
Ode. The “inspiring sea” is Wordsworth’s “immortal sea.” Both poets
rejoice that some of the impulses and ideals of youth are kept alive
in old age.

21. Earth gets its price, etc.: Notice the special meaning given to
Earth here, in contrast with heaven in line

29. Here again the
thought is suggested by Wordsworth’s Ode, sixth strophe:

23. Shrives: The priest shrives one when he hears confession and
grants absolution.

25. Devil’s booth: Expand this metaphor and unfold its application
to every-day life.

27. Cap and bells: The conventional dress of the court fool, or
jester, of the Middle Ages, and, after him, of the stage clown,
consisted of the “fool’s cap” and suit of motley, ornamented with
little tinkling bells.

28. Bubbles we buy, etc.: This line, as first published, had “earn”
for “buy.”

31. This line read originally: “There is no price set,” etc. The next
line began with “And.”

32-95. This rapturous passage descriptive of June is unquestionably
the most familiar and most celebrated piece[139] of nature poetry in our
literature. It is not only beautiful and inspiring in its felicitous
phrasings of external nature, but it is especially significant as a
true expression of the heart and soul of the poet himself. It was
always “the high-tide of the year” with Lowell in June, when his
spirits were in fine accord with the universal joy of nature. Wherever
in his poetry he refers to spring and its associations, he always
expresses the same ecstasy of delight. The passage must be compared
with the opening lines of Under the Willows (which he at first named
A June Idyll):

And in Sunthin’ in the Pastoral Line the coming of spring is
delightfully pictured:

In a letter written in June, 1867, Lowell says: “There never is such
a season, and that shows what a poet God is. He says the same thing
over to us so often and always new. Here I’ve been reading the same
poem for near half a century, and never had a notion what the
buttercup in the third stanza meant before.”

It is worth noting that Lowell’s happy June corresponds to May in the
English poets, as in Wordsworth’s Ode:

In New England where “Northern natur” is “slow an’ apt to doubt,”[140]

or as Hosea Biglow says:

41. The original edition has “grasping” instead of “groping.”

42. Climbs to a soul, etc.: In his intimate sympathy with nature,
Lowell endows her forms with conscious life, as Wordsworth did, who
says in Lines Written in Early Spring:

So Lowell in The Cathedral says:

So again he says in Under the Willows:

It must be remembered that this humanizing of nature is an attitude
toward natural objects characteristic only of modern poetry, being
practically unknown in English poetry before the period of Burns and
Wordsworth.

45. The cowslip startles: Surprises the eye with its bright patches
of green sprinkled with golden blossoms. Cowslip is the common name
in New England for the marsh-marigold, which appears early in spring
in low wet meadows, and[141] furnishes not infrequently a savory “mess of
greens” for the farmer’s dinner-table.

46. Compare Al Fresco, lines 34-39:

56. Nice: Delicately discriminating.

62. This line originally read “because God so wills it.”

71. Maize has sprouted: There is an anxious period for the farmer
after his corn is planted, for if the spring is “backward” and the
weather cold, his seed may decay in the ground before sprouting.

73. So in Sunthin’ in the Pastoral Line, when robin-redbreast sees
the “hossches’nuts’ leetle hands unfold” he knows—

77. Note the happy effect of the internal rhyme in this line.

93. Healed with snow: Explain the appropriateness of the metaphor.

94-95. Is the transition here from the prelude to the story abrupt, or
do the preceding lines lead up to it appropriately? Just why does Sir
Launfal now remember his vow? Do these lines introduce the “theme”
that the musing organist has finally found in dreamland, or the
symbolic illustration of his theme?

97. Richest mail: The knight’s coat of mail was usually of polished
steel, often richly decorated with inlaid patterns of gold and jewels.
To serve his high purpose, Sir Launfal brings forth his most precious
treasures.[142]

99. Holy Grail: According to medieval legend, the Sangreal was the
cup or chalice, made of emerald, which was used by Christ, at the last
supper, and in which Joseph of Arimathea caught the last drops of
Christ’s blood when he was taken down from the cross. The quest of the
Grail is the central theme of the Arthurian Romances. Tennyson’s Holy
Grail should be read, and the student should also be made familiar
with the beautiful versions of the legend in Abbey’s series of mural
paintings in the Boston Public Library, and in Wagner’s Parsifal.

103. On the rushes: In ancient halls and castles the floors were
commonly strewn with rushes. In Taming of the Shrew, when preparing
for the home-coming of Petruchio and his bride, Grumio says: “Is
supper ready, the house trimmed, rushes strewed, cobwebs swept?”

109. The crows flapped, etc.: Suggestive of the quiet, heavy flight
of the crow in a warm day. The beginning and the end of the stanza
suggest drowsy quiet. The vision begins in this stanza. The nature
pictures are continued, but with new symbolical meaning.

114. Like an outpost of winter: The cold, gloomy castle stands in
strong contrast to the surrounding landscape filled with the joyous
sunshine of summer. So the proud knight’s heart is still inaccessible
to true charity and warm human sympathy. So aristocracy in its power
and pride stands aloof from democracy with its humility and aspiration
for human brotherhood. This stanza is especially figurative. The poet
is unfolding the main theme, the underlying moral purpose, of the
whole poem, but it is still kept in vague, dreamy symbolism.

116. North Countree: The north of England, the home of the border
ballads. This form of the word “countree,” with accent on the last
syllable, is common in the old ballads. Here it gives a flavor of
antiquity in keeping with the story.

122. Pavilions tall: The trees, as in line 125, the broad green tents.
Note how the military figure, beginning with[143] “outposts,” in line 115,
is continued and developed throughout the stanza, and reverted to in
the word “siege” in the next stanza.

130. Maiden knight: A young, untried, unpracticed knight. The
expression occurs in Tennyson’s Sir Galahad. So “maiden mail” below.

137. As a locust-leaf: The small delicate leaflets of the compound
locust-leaf seem always in a “lightsome” movement.

138. The original edition has “unscarred mail.”

138-139. Compare the last lines of Tennyson’s Sir Galahad:

147. Made morn: Let in the morning, or came into the full morning
light as the huge gate opened.

148. Leper: Why did the poet make the crouching beggar a leper?

152. For “gan shrink” the original has “did shrink.”

155. Bent of stature: Criticise this phrase.

158. So he tossed … in scorn: This is the turning-point of the
moral movement of the story. Sir Launfal at the very beginning makes
his fatal mistake; his noble spirit and lofty purposes break down with
the first test. He refuses to see a brother in the loathsome leper;
the light and warmth of human brotherhood had not yet entered his
soul, just as the summer sunshine had not entered the frowning castle.
The regeneration of his soul must be worked out through wandering and
suffering. Compare the similar plot of the Ancient Mariner.

163. No true alms: The alms must also be in the heart.

164. Originally “He gives nothing but worthless gold.”

166. Slender mite: An allusion to the widow’s “two mites.” (Luke
xxi, 1-4.)

168. The all-sustaining Beauty: The all-pervading spirit of God that
unites all things in one sympathetic whole. This[144] divinity in humanity
is its highest beauty. In The Oak Lowell says:

172. A god goes with it: The god-like quality of real charity, of
heart to heart sympathy. In a letter written a little after the
composition of this poem Lowell speaks of love and freedom as being
“the sides which Beauty presented to him then.”

172. Store: Plenty, abundance.

175. Summers: What is gained by the use of this word instead of
winters?

176. Wold: A high, open and barren field that catches the full sweep
of the wind. The “wolds” of north England are like the “downs” of the
south.

181. The little brook: In a letter written in December, 1848, Lowell
says: “Last night I walked to Watertown over the snow with the new
moon before me and a sky exactly like that in Page’s evening
landscape. Orion was rising behind me, and, as I stood on the hill
just before you enter the village, the stillness of the fields around
me was delicious, broken only by the tinkle of a little brook which
runs too swiftly for Frost to catch it. My picture of the brook in
Sir Launfal was drawn from it.” See the poem Beaver Brook
(originally called The Mill), and the winter picture in An
Indian-Summer Reverie, lines 148-196.

184. Groined: Groined arches are formed by the intersection of two
arches crossing at any angle, forming a ribbed vault; a characteristic
feature of Gothic architecture.

190. Forest-crypt: The crypt of a church is the basement, filled
with arched pillars that sustain the building. The cavern of the
brook, as the poet will have us imagine it, is like this subterranean
crypt, where the pillars are like trees and the groined arches like
interlacing branches, decorated with frost leaves. The poet seems to
have had in mind[145] throughout the description the interior of the
Gothic cathedrals, as shown by the many suggestive terms used,
“groined,” “crypt,” “aisles,” “fretwork,” and “carvings.”

193. Fretwork: The ornamental work carved in intricate patterns, in
oak or stone, on the ceilings of old halls and churches.

195. Sharp relief: When a figure stands out prominently from the
marble or other material from which it is cut, it is said to be in
“high relief,” in distinction from “low relief,” bas relief.

196. Arabesques: Complicated patterns of interwoven foliage, flowers
and fruits, derived from Arabian art. Lowell had undoubtedly studied
many times the frost designs on the window panes.

201. That crystalled the beams, etc.: That caught the beams of moon
and sun as in a crystal. For “that” the original edition has “which.”

204. Winter-palace of ice: An allusion, apparently, to the
ice-palace built by the Empress of Russia, Catherine II, “most
magnificent and mighty freak. The wonder of the North,” Cowper called
it. Compare Lowell’s description of the frost work with Cowper’s
similar description in The Task, in the beginning of Book V.

205-210. ‘Twas as if every image, etc.: Note the exquisite fancy in
these lines. The elves have preserved in the ice the pictures of
summer foliage and clouds that were mirrored in the water as models
for another summer.

211. The hall: In the old castles the hall was always the large
banqueting room, originally the common living room. Here all large
festivities would take place.

213. Corbel: A bracket-like support projecting from a wall from
which an arch springs or on which a beam rests. The poet has in mind
an ancient hall in which the ceiling is the exposed woodwork of the
roof.

214. This line at first read: “With the lightsome,” etc. Why did
Lowell’s refining taste strike out “the”?[146]

216. Yule-log: The great
log, sometimes the root of a tree, burned in the huge fireplace on
Christmas eve, with special ceremonies and merrymakings. It was
lighted with a brand preserved from the last year’s log, and connected
with its burning were many quaint superstitions and customs. The
celebration is a survival through our Scandinavian ancestors of the
winter festival in honor of the god Thor. Herrick describes it
trippingly in one of his songs:

219. Like a locust, etc.: Only one who has heard both sounds
frequently can appreciate the close truth of this simile. The
metaphors and similes in this stanza are deserving of special study.

226. Harp: Prof. William Vaughn Moody questions whether “the use of
Sir Launfal’s hair as a ‘harp’ for the wind to play a Christmas carol
on” is not “a bit grotesque.” Does the picture of Sir Launfal in these
two stanzas belong in the Prelude or in the story in Part Second?

230. Carol of its own: Contrasted with the carols that are being
sung inside the castle.

231. Burden: The burden or refrain is the part repeated at the end
of each stanza of a ballad or song, expressing the main theme or
sentiment. Still is in the sense of always, ever.

233. Seneschal: An officer of the castle who had charge of feasts
and ceremonies, like the modern Lord Chamberlain of the King’s palace.
Note the effect of the striking figure in this line.

237. Window-slits: Narrow perpendicular openings in[147] the wall,
serving both as windows and as loopholes from which to fire at an
enemy.

238. Build out its piers: The beams of light are like the piers or
jetties that extend out from shore into the water to protect ships.
Such piers are also built out to protect the shore from the violent
wash of the ocean. The poet may possibly, however, have had in mind
the piers of a bridge that support the arches and stand against the
sweep of the stream.

243. In this line instead of “the weaver Winter” the original has “the
frost’s swift shuttles.” Was the change an improvement?

244. A single crow: Note the effect of introducing this lone crow
into the bleak landscape.

250. It must not be forgotten that this old Sir Launfal is only in the
dream of the real Sir Launfal, who is still lying on the rushes within
his own castle. As the poor had often been turned away with cold,
heartless selfishness, so he is now turned away from his own “hard
gate.”

251. Sate: The use of this archaic form adds to the antique flavor
of the poem. So with the use of the word “tree” for cross, in line 281
below. Lowell was passionately fond of the old poets and the quaint
language of the early centuries of English literature, and loved to
introduce into his own poetry words and phrases from these sources. Of
this habit he says:

254. Recked: Cared for.[148]

255. Surcoat: A long flowing garment worn over the armor, on which
was “emblazoned” the coat of arms. If the knight were a crusader, a
red cross was embroidered thus on the surcoat.

256. The sign: The sign of the cross, the symbol of humility and
love. This is the first real intimation, the keynote, of the
transformation that has taken place in Sir Launfal’s soul.

259. Idle mail: Useless, ineffectual protection. This figure carries
us back to the “gilded mail,” line 131, in which Sir Launfal “flashed
forth” at the beginning of his quest. The poem is full of these minor
antitheses, which should be traced by the student.

264-272. He sees, etc.: This description is not only beautiful in
itself, but it serves an important purpose in the plan of the poem. It
is a kind of condensation or symbolic expression of Sir Launfal’s many
years of wandering in oriental lands. The hint or brief outline is
given, which must be expanded by the imagination of the reader.
Otherwise the story would be inconsistent and incomplete. Notice how
deftly the picture is introduced.

272. Signal of palms: A group of palm trees seen afar off over the
desert is a welcome signal of an oasis with water for the relief of
the suffering traveler. Some critics have objected that so small a
spring could not have “waved” so large a signal!

273. Notice the abruptness with which the leper is here introduced,
just as before at the beginning of the story. The vision of “a sunnier
clime” is quickly swept away. The shock of surprise now has a very
different effect upon Sir Launfal.

275. This line at first read: “But Sir Launfal sees naught save the
grewsome thing.”

278. White: “And, behold, Miriam became leprous, white as snow.”
(Numbers xii, 10.)

279. Desolate horror: The adjective suggests the out[149]cast, isolated
condition of lepers. They were permitted no contact with other people.
The ten lepers who met Jesus in Samaria “stood afar off and lifted up
their voices.”

281. On the tree: On the cross. “Whom they slew and hanged on a
tree, Him God raised up the third day.” (Acts x, 39.) This use of
the word is common in early literature, especially in the ballads.

285. See John xx, 25-27.

287. Through him: The leper. Note that the address is changed in
these two lines. Compare Matthew xxv, 34-40. This gift to the leper
differs how from the gift in Part First?

291. Leprosie: The antiquated spelling is used for the perfect rhyme
and to secure the antique flavor.

292. Girt: The original word here was “caged.”

294. Ashes and dust: Explain the metaphor. Compare with “sackcloth
and ashes.” See Esther iv, 3; Jonah iii, 6; Job ii, 8.

300, 301. The figurative character of the lines is emphasized by the
word “soul” at the end. The miracle of Cana seems to have been in the
poet’s mind.

304, 305. The leper is transfigured and Christ himself appears in the
vision of the sleeping Sir Launfal.

307. The Beautiful Gate: “The gate of the temple which is called
Beautiful,” where Peter healed the lame man. (Acts iii, 2.)

308. Himself the Gate: See John x, 7, 9: “I am the door.”

310. Temple of God: “Know ye not that ye are the temple of God, and
that the spirit of God dwelleth in you?” (I Corinthians iii, 16, 17;
vi, 19.)

312. This line at first began with “which.”

313. Shaggy: Is this term applicable to Sir Launfal’s present
condition, or is the whole simile carried a little beyond the point of
true likeness?

314. Softer: Lowell originally wrote “calmer” here. The change
increased the effect of the alliteration. Was it otherwise an
improvement?[150]

315. Lo, it is I: John vi, 20.

316. Without avail: Was Sir Launfal’s long quest entirely without
avail? Compare the last lines of Tennyson’s Holy Grail, where Arthur
complains that his knights who went upon the Holy Quest have followed
“wandering fires, lost in the quagmire,” and “leaving human wrongs to
right themselves.”

320, 321. Matthew xxvi, 26-28; Mark xiv, 22-24.

322. Holy Supper: The Last Supper of Christ and his disciples, upon
which is instituted the communion service of the churches. The spirit
of the Holy Supper, the communion of true brotherhood, is realized
when the Christ-like spirit triumphs in the man. “Inasmuch as ye have
done it unto one of the least of these, my brethren, ye have done it
unto me.” (Matthew xxv, 40.)

326. The original has “bestows” for “gives.”

328. Swound: The antiquated form of swoon.

332, 333. Interpret the lines. Did the poet have in mind the spiritual
armor described in Ephesians vi, 11-17?

336. Hangbird: The oriole, so called from its hanging nest; one of
Lowell’s most beloved “garden acquaintances” at Elmwood. In a letter
he says: “They build a pendulous nest, and so flash in the sun that
our literal rustics call them fire hang-birds.” See the description in
Under the Willows beginning:

See also the charming prose description in My Garden Acquaintance.

338. Summer’s long siege at last is o’er: The return to this figure
rounds out the story and serves to give unity to the plan of the poem.
The siege is successful, summer has conquered and entered the castle,
warming and lighting its cold, cheerless interior.

342, 343. Is Lowell expressing here his own convictions about ideal
democracy?

[151]

THE SHEPHERD OF KING ADMETUS

Apollo, the god of music, having given offense to Zeus, was condemned
to serve for the space of one year as a shepherd under Admetus, King
of Thessaly. This is one of the most charming of the myths of Apollo,
and has been often used by the poets. Remarking upon this poem, and
others of its period, Scudder says that it shows “how persistently in
Lowell’s mind was present this aspect of the poet which makes him a
seer,” a recognition of an “all-embracing, all-penetrating power which
through the poet transmutes nature into something finer and more
eternal, and gives him a vantage ground from which to perceive more
truly the realities of life.” Compare with this poem An Incident in a
Railroad Car.

5. Lyre: According to mythology, Apollo’s lyre was a tortoise-shell
strung with seven strings.

8. Fagots for a witch: The introduction of this witch element into a
Greek legend rather mars the consistency of the poem. Lowell finally
substituted for the stanza the following:

HEBE

Lowell suggests in this dainty symbolical lyric his conception of the
poet’s inspiration. Hebe was cup-bearer to the gods of Olympus, in
Greek mythology, and poured for them their nectar. She was also the
goddess of eternal youth. By an extension of the symbolism she becomes
goddess of the eternal joyousness of the poetic gift. The “influence
fleet” is the divine afflatus that fills the creative mind of the
poet.[152] But Pegasus cannot be made to work in harness at will. True
inspiration comes only in choice moments. Coy Hebe cannot be wooed
violently. Elsewhere he says of the muse:

“Follow thy life,” he says, “be true to thy best self, then Hebe will
bring her choicest ambrosia.” That is—

TO THE DANDELION

Four stanzas were added to this poem after its first appearance, the
sixth, seventh, eighth and tenth, but in the finally revised edition
these were cut out, very likely because Lowell regarded them as too
didactic. Indeed the poem is complete and more artistic without them.

“Of Lowell’s earlier pieces,” says Stedman, “the one which shows the
finest sense of the poetry of nature is that addressed To the
Dandelion. The opening phrase ranks with the selectest of Wordsworth
and Keats, to whom imaginative diction came intuitively, and both
thought and language are felicitous throughout. This poem contains
many of its author’s peculiar beauties and none of his faults; it was
the outcome of the mood that can summon a rare spirit of art to
express the gladdest thought and most elusive feeling.”

6. Eldorado: The land of gold, supposed to be somewhere in South
America, which the European adventurers, especially the Spaniards,
were constantly seeking in the sixteenth century.[153]

27. Sybaris: An ancient Greek colony in southern Italy whose
inhabitants were devoted to luxury and pleasure.

52-54. Compare Sir Launfal.

MY LOVE

Lowell’s love for Maria White is beautifully enshrined in this little
poem. He wrote it at about the time of their engagement. While it is
thus personal in its origin, it is universal in its expression of
ideal womanhood, and so has a permanent interest and appeal. In its
strong simplicity and crystal purity of style, it is a little
masterpiece. Though filled with the passion of his new and beautiful
love, its movement is as calm and artistically restrained as that of
one of Wordsworth’s best lyrics.

THE CHANGELING

This is one of the tender little poems that refer to the death of the
poet’s daughter Blanche, which occurred in March, 1847. The First
Snow-fall and She Came and Went embody the same personal grief.
When sending the former to his friend Sydney H. Gay for publication,
he wrote: “May you never have the key which shall unlock the whole
meaning of the poem to you.” Underwood, in his Biographical Sketch
says that “friends of the poet, who were admitted to the study in the
upper chamber, remember the pairs of baby shoes that hung over a
picture-frame.” The volume in which this poem first appeared contained
this dedication—”To the ever fresh and happy memory of our little
Blanche this volume is reverently dedicated.”

A changeling, according to folk-lore and fairy tale, is a fairy child
that the fairies substitute for a human child that they have stolen.
The changeling was generally sickly, shrivelled and in every way
repulsive. Here the poet reverses the superstition, substituting the
angels for the mis[154]chievous fairies, who bring an angel child in place
of the lost one. Whittier has a poem on the same theme, The
Changeling.

29. Zingari: The Gypsies—suggested by “wandering angels” above—who
wander about the earth, and also sometimes steal children, according
to popular belief.

52. Bliss it: A rather violent use of the word, not recognized by
the dictionaries, but nevertheless felicitous.

AN INDIAN-SUMMER REVERIE

Lowell’s love of Elmwood and its surroundings finds expression
everywhere in his writings, both prose and verse, but nowhere in a
more direct, personal manner than in this poem. He was not yet thirty
when the poem was written, and Cambridge could still be called a
“village,” but the familiar scenes already had their retrospective
charms, which increased with the passing years. Later in life he again
celebrated his affection for this home environment in Under the
Willows.

“There are poetic lines and phrases in the poem,” says Scudder, “and
more than all the veil of the season hangs tremulously over the whole,
so that one is gently stirred by the poetic feeling of the rambling
verses; yet, after all, the most enduring impression is of the young
man himself in that still hour of his life, when he was conscious, not
so much of a reform to which he must put his hand, as of the love of
beauty, and of the vague melancholy which mingles with beauty in the
soul of a susceptible poet. The river winding through the marshes, the
distant sound of the ploughman, the near chatter of the chipmunk, the
individual trees, each living its own life, the march of the seasons
flinging lights and shadows over the broad scene, the pictures of
human life associated with his own experience, the hurried, survey of
his village years—all these pictures float before his vision; and
then, with an abruptness which is like the choking of[155] the singer’s
voice with tears, there wells up the thought of the little life which
held as in one precious drop the love and faith of his heart.”

1. Visionary tints: The term Indian summer is given to almost any
autumnal period of exceptionally quiet, dry and hazy weather. In
America these characteristic features of late fall were especially
associated with the middle West, at a time when the Indians occupied
that region.

5. Hebe: Hebe was cup-bearer to the gods at their feasts on Olympus.
Like Hebe, Autumn fills the sloping fields, rimmed round with distant
hills, with her own delicious atmosphere of dreamy and poetic
influence.

11. My own projected spirit: It seems to the poet that his own
spirit goes out to the world, steeping it in reverie like his own,
rather than receiving the influence from nature’s mood.

25. Gleaning Ruth: For the story of Ruth’s gleaning in the fields of
Boaz, see the book of Ruth, ii.

38. Chipmunk: Lowell at first had “squirrel” here, which would be
inconsistent with the “underground fastness.” And yet, are chipmunks
seen up in walnut trees?

40. This line originally read, “with a chipping bound.” Cheeping is
chirping, or giving the peculiar cluck that sounds like “cheep,” or
“chip.”

45. Faint as smoke, etc.: The farmer burns the stubble and other
refuse of the season before his “fall plowing.”

46. The single crow, etc.: Note the full significance of this detail
of the picture. Compare Bryant’s Death of the Flowers:

50. Compare with this stanza the pretty little poem, The Birch Tree.

68. Lavish of their long-hid gold: The chestnut leaves,[156] it will be
remembered, turn to a bright golden yellow in autumn. These
descriptions of autumn foliage are all as true as beautiful.

73. Maple-swamps: We generally speak of the swamp-maple, which grows
in low ground, and has particularly brilliant foliage in autumn.

82. Tangled blackberry: This is the creeping blackberry of course,
which every one remembers whose feet have been caught in its prickly
tangles.

91. Martyr oak: The oak is surrounded with the blazing foliage of
the ivy, like a burning martyr.

99. Dear marshes: The Charles River near Elmwood winds through broad
salt marshes, the characteristic features of which Lowell describes
with minute and loving fidelity.

127. Bobolink: If Lowell had a favorite bird, it was the bobolink,
although the oriole was a close competitor for his praises. In one of
his letters he says: “I think the bobolink the best singer in the
world, even undervaluing the lark and the nightingale in the
comparison.” And in another he writes: “That liquid tinkle of theirs
is the true fountain of youth if one can only drink it with the right
ears, and I always date the New Year from the day of my first draught.
Messer Roberto di Lincoln, with his summer alb over his shoulders, is
the true chorister for the bridals of earth and sky. There is no bird
that seems to me so thoroughly happy as he, so void of all arrière
pensée about getting a livelihood. The robin sings matins and vespers
somewhat conscientiously, it seems to me—makes a business of it and
pipes as it were by the yard—but Bob squanders song like a poet.”

Compare the description in Sunthin’ in the Pastoral Line:

See also the opening lines of Under the Willows for another
description full of the ecstasy of both bird and poet. The two
passages woven together appear in the essay Cambridge Thirty Years
Ago, as a quotation. An early poem on The Bobolink, delightful and
widely popular, was omitted from later editions of his poems by
Lowell, perhaps because to his maturer taste the theme was too much
moralized in his early manner. “Shelley and Wordsworth,” says Mr.
Brownell, “have not more worthily immortalized the skylark than Lowell
has the bobolink, its New England congener.”

134. Another change: The description now returns to the marshes.

147. Simond’s hill: In the essay Cambridge Thirty Years Ago Lowell
describes the village as seen from the top of this hill.

159-161. An allusion to the Mexican War, against which Lowell was
directing the satire of the Biglow Papers.

174-182. Compare the winter pictures in Whittier’s Snowbound.

177. Formal candles: Candles lighted for some form or ceremony, as
in a religious service.

192. Stonehenge: Stonehenge on Salisbury plain in the south of
England is famous for its huge blocks of stone now lying in confusion,
supposed to be the remains of an ancient Druid temple.