Studies of Lowell | Page 4

them. D.W.]

LITERARY FRIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCES--Studies of Lowell
by William Dean Howells
STUDIES OF LOWELL
I have already spoken of my earliest meetings with Lowell at
Cambridge when I came to New England on a literary pilgrimage from

the West in 1860. I saw him more and more after I went to live in
Cambridge in 1866; and I now wish to record what I knew of him
during the years that passed between this date and that of his death. If
the portrait I shall try to paint does not seem a faithful likeness to others
who knew him, I shall only claim that so he looked to me, at this
moment and at that. If I do not keep myself quite out of the picture,
what painter ever did?

I.
It was in the summer of 1865 that I came home from my consular post
at Venice; and two weeks after I landed in Boston, I went out to see
Lowell at Elmwood, and give him an inkstand that I had brought him
from Italy. The bronze lobster whose back opened and disclosed an
inkpot and a sand- box was quite ugly; but I thought it beautiful then,
and if Lowell thought otherwise he never did anything to let me know
it. He put the thing in the middle of his writing-table (he nearly always
wrote on a pasteboard pad resting upon his knees), and there it
remained as long as I knew the place--a matter of twenty-five years; but
in all that time I suppose the inkpot continued as dry as the sand-box.
My visit was in the heat of August, which is as fervid in Cambridge as
it can well be anywhere, and I still have a sense of his study windows
lifted to the summer night, and the crickets and grasshoppers crying in
at them from the lawns and the gardens outside. Other people went
away from Cambridge in the summer to the sea and to the mountains,
but Lowell always stayed at Elmwood, in an impassioned love for his
home and for his town. I must have found him there in the afternoon,
and he must have made me sup with him (dinner was at two o'clock)
and then go with him for a long night of talk in his study. He liked to
have some one help him idle the time away, and keep him as long as
possible from his work; and no doubt I was impersonally serving his
turn in this way, aside from any pleasure he might have had in my
company as some one he had always been kind to, and as a fresh arrival
from the Italy dear to us both.
He lighted his pipe, and from the depths of his easychair, invited my
shy youth to all the ease it was capable of in his presence. It was not
much; I loved him, and he gave me reason to think that he was fond of
me, but in Lowell I was always conscious of an older and closer and

stricter civilization than my own, an unbroken tradition, a more
authoritative status. His democracy was more of the head and mine
more of the heart, and his denied the equality which mine affirmed. But
his nature was so noble and his reason so tolerant that whenever in our
long acquaintance I found it well to come to open rebellion, as I more
than once did, he admitted my right of insurrection, and never resented
the outbreak. I disliked to differ with him, and perhaps he subtly felt
this so much that he would not dislike me for doing it. He even suffered
being taxed with inconsistency, and where he saw that he had not been
quite just, he would take punishment for his error, with a contrition that
was sometimes humorous and always touching.
Just then it was the dark hour before the dawn with Italy, and he was
interested but not much encouraged by what I could tell him of the
feeling in Venice against the Austrians. He seemed to reserve a like
scepticism concerning the fine things I was hoping for the Italians in
literature, and he confessed an interest in the facts treated which in the
retrospect, I am aware, was more tolerant than participant of my
enthusiasm. That was always Lowell's attitude towards the opinions of
people he liked, when he could not go their lengths with them, and
nothing was more characteristic of his affectionate nature and his just
intelligence. He was a man of the most strenuous convictions, but he
loved many sorts of people whose convictions he disagreed with, and
he suffered even prejudices counter to his own if they were not ignoble.
In the whimsicalities of others he delighted as