Studies of Lowell | Page 6

He liked that, apparently, and said he
had been meaning to call upon me; and that he was coming very soon.
He was as good as his word, and after that hardly a week of any kind of
weather passed but he mounted the steps to the door of the ugly little
house in which I lived, two miles away from him, and asked me to
walk. These walks continued, I suppose, until Lowell went abroad for a
winter in the early seventies. They took us all over Cambridge, which
he knew and loved every inch of, and led us afield through the
straggling, unhandsome outskirts, bedrabbled with squalid Irish
neighborhoods, and fraying off into marshes and salt meadows. He
liked to indulge an excess of admiration for the local landscape, and
though I never heard him profess a preference for the Charles River
flats to the finest Alpine scenery, I could well believe he would do so
under provocation of a fit listener's surprise. He had always so much of
the boy in him that he liked to tease the over-serious or over-sincere.
He liked to tease and he liked to mock, especially his juniors, if any
touch of affectation, or any little exuberance of manner gave him the
chance; when he once came to fetch me, and the young mistress of the
house entered with a certain excessive elasticity, he sprang from his
seat, and minced towards her, with a burlesque of her buoyant carriage

which made her laugh. When he had given us his heart in trust of ours,
he used us like a younger brother and sister; or like his own children.
He included our children in his affection, and he enjoyed our fondness
for them as if it were something that had come back to him from his
own youth. I think he had also a sort of artistic, a sort of ethical
pleasure in it, as being of the good tradition, of the old honest, simple
material, from which pleasing effects in literature and civilization were
wrought. He liked giving the children books, and writing tricksy
fancies in these, where he masked as a fairy prince; and as long as he
lived he remembered his early kindness for them.

IV.
In those walks of ours I believe he did most of the talking, and from his
talk then and at other times there remains to me an impression of his
growing conservatism. I had in fact come into his life when it had spent
its impulse towards positive reform, and I was to be witness of its
increasing tendency towards the negative sort. He was quite past the
storm and stress of his anti-slavery age; with the close of the war which
had broken for him all his ideals of inviolable peace, he had reached the
age of misgiving. I do not mean that I ever heard him express doubt of
what he had helped to do, or regret for what he had done; but I know
that he viewed with critical anxiety what other men were doing with the
accomplished facts. His anxiety gave a cast of what one may call
reluctance from the political situation, and turned him back towards
those civic and social defences which he had once seemed willing to
abandon. I do not mean that he lost faith in democracy; this faith he
constantly then and signally afterwards affirmed; but he certainly had
no longer any faith in insubordination as a means of grace. He preached
a quite Socratic reverence for law, as law, and I remember that once
when I had got back from Canada in the usual disgust for the American
custom- house, and spoke lightly of smuggling as not an evil in itself,
and perhaps even a right under our vexatious tariff, he would not have
it, but held that the illegality of the act made it a moral of fence. This
was not the logic that would have justified the attitude of the anti-
slavery men towards the fugitive slave act; but it was in accord with
Lowell's feeling about John Brown, whom he honored while always
condemning his violation of law; and it was in the line of all his later

thinking. In this, he wished you to agree with him, or at least he wished
to make you; but he did not wish you to be more of his mind than he
was himself. In one of those squalid Irish neighborhoods I confessed a
grudge (a mean and cruel grudge, I now think it) for the increasing
presence of that race among us, but this did not please him; and I am
sure that whatever misgiving he had as to the future of America, he
would not have had it less than it had