THE ARENA.

No. LXXIII.

DECEMBER, 1895.

PERSONAL RECOLLECTIONS OF AMERICA'S SEVEN GREAT POETS.

I. A MORNING WITH LOWELL, BY REV. M. J. SAVAGE. My boyhood was spent on a poor little farm in the edge of the village of Norridgewock, in Maine. We had very few books, and those almost entirely religious. Having suffered all my life from book-hunger, it was a great thing for me when I was able to find anything to satisfy it. In one way we were fortunate beyond most small country towns. At that time there was a man, strong and original in character, who carried on the trade of harness-maker and saddler. Well-informed and thoughtful himself, he took an unselfish interest in the enlightenment of his town. As a practical expression of this, he had established a little circulating library in his harness-shop; and anyone could have the use of this on the payment of fifty cents a year. Sometimes we were not able to afford even this small outlay, but during most of my boyhood I had access to this little library. I was specially fond of poetry, and read nearly all of the standard English poets long before I had any idea of their relative rank or value.

It was in this library that I made my discovery of Lowell. The book was his first series of the "Biglow Papers." The humor attracted me, as humor has always attracted me ever since; but I also acquired a taste for the genuine poetic ability of the man, and was thrilled and roused by his patriotic and humanitarian enthusiasm. Ever since that day, I have looked eagerly for anything from the pen of Lowell and have always regarded him, and do still, as, on the whole, perhaps the greatest of our American poets. I hesitate in saying this when I think of Emerson and Whitman. But if poetic form is to be counted in giving a man his rank, it must be confessed that these two Copyrighted 1895, by the Arena Publishing Co.

are seriously lacking. He is the first among our wits, in the English sense of that word; and he seems to me to have reached a higher height, and sounded a deeper depth, than almost any other of our singers.

Since admiration of a man's work paves naturally the way for love of his person, I learned to love Lowell before I had

ever seen him. And since he had so uniformly and so finely voiced the best things in the way of moral reform and the higher patriotism, I had come to look upon him as a leader who was always to be found in the van. When, therefore, a few years ago, there appeared in the Atlantic a poem of his, under the title "Credidimus Jovem Regnare" I read it with a shock of disappointment. The title of this poem might perhaps be somewhat freely rendered, "We used to

believe that Jupiter reigned." It had about it that humorous touch which is always so natural to Lowell, and it was a little difficult to be sure as to just how much of earnest meaning it might contain. But it read like the reactionary utterances of an old man, who, although he had once been a leader in the world's progress, had become weary of the battle, and out with the tendency of things. He did not seem to me to comprehend the deeper meanings of the scientific study of the age; he talked as though the world were putting protoplasm in the place of God, and in general showed that, if he apprehended the scientific drift of modern thought, he was at any rate out of sympathy with it. Knowing that his antecedents and training had been Unitarian and liberal, I perhaps forgot for the time that his life had been devoted to literature and that he had never been a student of science. At any rate, I felt so deeply on the subject that I wrote and published a tiny book, under the title "These Degenerate Days," dedicating it to him and sending him a copy. This called out a letter from him, which is valuable in a biographical way, as indicating his real position and outlook over the world. Because, while minister to England, he frequently attended the Established Church, and because the Episcopal burial service was read at his funeral, many have supposed that as he grew older he became more conservative and less in sympathy with liberal ideas. As bearing, however, on his real views, I will here quote a few words from his letter, which is dated from Deerfoot Farm on the 5th of April, 1887:

On my return here yesterday, I find your little book and note. I could not but be touched and pleased with both. I am pleased also with the stalwart faith you show,-a faith (in essentials) not greatly differing from my own, as you will see if you look into my “Cathedral," I think. The poem [Credidimus Jovem Regnare] on which you comment was composed fifteen years ago, and the title I originally meant to give it was "A Humorist's Growl," which would have explained that it was not argumentative, but only the expression of a mood.

It has seemed to me that this might be interesting to the public, as a declaration, in earnest prose, of Lowell's real position.

It was some time after this that I spent with Lowell the morning of which I am now to write. It was not long after his return from his position as minister to England; and, having made an appointment with him beforehand, I called on him in his home at Elmwood. He received me in his study, the large square room on the first floor, at the left of the entrance. Those who have seen him there will be

familiar with the room, ideal in its arrangements as the study of a poet. Many of those who have spoken or written of the surroundings of Lowell's boyhood and youth have seemed to find in them some explanation of his poetic nature.

The only difficulty with this is the fact that other boys, born and trained amid scenes and surroundings quite as poetical, do not turn out poets after all. At any rate, whether it had in it the power to create or develop the poetic faculty, it was the fit setting of a poet's life and work.

As I remember the way in which he received me, the quiet ease with which he made me perfectly at home, it may be proper for me to say a word concerning Lowell's general attitude toward the public. He was by birth an training an aristocrat in the best sense of that word. He never found it easy to make his life a common, to be freely entered and trodden down at random by all the world. He was not so easily accessible as Longfellow; he claimed that he had a right to his own time, his intimacies, and his friendships. But to those who knew him, to those to whom he opened his arms and his heart, he was the most delightful of companions. He has been severely criticised for the attitude of dignity and reserve which he took and maintained while he was our minister at the Court of St. James; and it is freely admitted that he was not one of those who liked to be slapped on the back by everybody, and that he was not willing to be made an errand boy or a London guide for wandering Americans. But no man who ever occupied a diplomatic position in Europe has ever stood more steadily for the essential principles of our republic, maintained more, uncompromisingly the dignity of an American citizen, or reflected more credit on his country.

So much for the general attitude of Lowell toward the outside world. After some time spent in general conversa