Studies of Lowell | Page 5

much as in his own.

II.
Our associations with Italy held over until the next day, when after
breakfast he went with me towards Boston as far as "the village": for so
he liked to speak of Cambridge in the custom of his younger days when
wide tracts of meadow separated Harvard Square from his life-long
home at Elmwood. We stood on the platform of the horsecar together,
and when I objected to his paying my fare in the American fashion, he
allowed that the Italian usage of each paying for himself was the politer
way. He would not commit himself about my returning to Venice (for I
had not given up my place, yet, and was away on leave), but he
intimated his distrust of the flattering conditions of life abroad. He said
it was charming to be treated 'da signore', but he seemed to doubt

whether it was well; and in this as in all other things he showed his
final fealty to the American ideal.
It was that serious and great moment after the successful close of the
civil war when the republican consciousness was more robust in us
than ever before or since; but I cannot recall any reference to the
historical interest of the time in Lowell's talk. It had been all about
literature and about travel; and now with the suggestion of the word
village it began to be a little about his youth. I have said before how
reluctant he was to let his youth go from him; and perhaps the touch
with my juniority had made him realize how near he was to fifty, and
set him thinking of the past which had sorrows in it to age him beyond
his years. He would never speak of these, though he often spoke of the
past. He told once of having been on a brief journey when he was six
years old, with his father, and of driving up to the gate of Elmwood in
the evening, and his father saying, "Ah, this is a pleasant place! I
wonder who lives here--what little boy?" At another time he pointed
out a certain window in his study, and said he could see himself
standing by it when he could only get his chin on the window-sill. His
memories of the house, and of everything belonging to it, were very
tender; but he could laugh over an escapade of his youth when he
helped his fellow-students pull down his father's fences, in the pure zeal
of good-comradeship.

III.
My fortunes took me to New York, and I spent most of the winter of
1865-6 writing in the office of 'The Nation'. I contributed several
sketches of Italian travel to that paper; and one of these brought me a
precious letter from Lowell. He praised my sketch, which he said he
had read without the least notion who had written it, and he wanted me
to feel the full value of such an impersonal pleasure in it. At the same
time he did not fail to tell me that he disliked some pseudo-cynical
verses of mine which he had read in another place; and I believe it was
then that he bade me "sweat the Heine out of" me, "as men sweat the
mercury out of their bones."
When I was asked to be assistant editor of the Atlantic Monthly, and
came on to Boston to talk the matter over with the publishers, I went
out to Cambridge and consulted Lowell. He strongly urged me to take

the position (I thought myself hopefully placed in New York on The
Nation); and at the same time he seemed to have it on his heart to say
that he had recommended some one else for it, never, he owned, having
thought of me.
He was most cordial, but after I came to live in Cambridge (where the
magazine was printed, and I could more conveniently look over the
proofs), he did not call on me for more than a month, and seemed quite
to have forgotten me. We met one night at Mr. Norton's, for one of the
Dante readings, and he took no special notice of me till I happened to
say something that offered him a chance to give me a little humorous
snub. I was speaking of a paper in the Magazine on the "Claudian
Emissary," and I demanded (no doubt a little too airily) something like
"Who in the world ever heard of the Claudian Emissary?" "You are in
Cambridge, Mr. Howells," Lowell answered, and laughed at my
confusion. Having put me down, he seemed to soften towards me, and
at parting he said, with a light of half-mocking tenderness in his
beautiful eyes, "Goodnight, fellow-townsman." "I hardly knew we were
fellow-townsmen," I returned.