Studies of Lowell | Page 7

been the refuge and opportunity
of the poor of any race or color. Yet he would not have had it this alone.
There was a line in his poem on Agassiz which he left out of the
printed version, at the fervent entreaty of his friends, as saying too
bitterly his disappointment with his country. Writing at the distance of
Europe, and with America in the perspective which the alien
environment clouded, he spoke of her as "The Land of Broken
Promise." It was a splendid reproach, but perhaps too dramatic to bear
the full test of analysis, and yet it had the truth in it, and might, I think,
have usefully stood, to the end of making people think. Undoubtedly it
expressed his sense of the case, and in the same measure it would now
express that of many who love their country most among us. It is well
to hold one's country to her promises, and if there are any who think
she is forgetting them it is their duty to say so, even to the point of
bitter accusation. I do not suppose it was the "common man" of
Lincoln's dream that Lowell thought America was unfaithful to, though
as I have suggested he could be tender of the common man's hopes in
her; but he was impeaching in that blotted line her sincerity with the
uncommon man: the man who had expected of her a constancy to the
ideals of her youth end to the high martyr-moods of the war which had
given an unguarded and bewildering freedom to a race of slaves. He
was thinking of the shame of our municipal corruptions, the debased
quality of our national statesmanship, the decadence of our whole civic
tone, rather than of the increasing disabilities of the hard- working poor,
though his heart when he thought of them was with them, too, as it was
in "the time when the slave would not let him sleep."
He spoke very rarely of those times, perhaps because their political and
social associations were so knit up with the saddest and tenderest
personal memories, which it was still anguish to touch. Not only was he
"--not of the race That hawk, their sorrows in the market place,"
but so far as my witness went he shrank from mention of them. I do not

remember hearing him speak of the young wife who influenced him so
potently at the most vital moment, and turned him from his whole
scholarly and aristocratic tradition to an impassioned championship of
the oppressed; and he never spoke of the children he had lost. I recall
but one allusion to the days when he was fighting the anti-slavery battle
along the whole line, and this was with a humorous relish of his Irish
servant's disgust in having to wait upon a negro whom he had asked to
his table.
He was rather severe in his notions of the subordination his domestics
owed him. They were "to do as they were bid," and yet he had a
tenderness for such as had been any time with him, which was
wounded when once a hired man long in his employ greedily
overreached him in a certain transaction. He complained of that with a
simple grief for the man's indelicacy after so many favors from him,
rather than with any resentment. His hauteur towards his dependents
was theoretic; his actual behavior was of the gentle consideration
common among Americans of good breeding, and that recreant hired
man had no doubt never been suffered to exceed him in shows of
mutual politeness. Often when the maid was about weightier matters,
he came and opened his door to me himself, welcoming me with the
smile that was like no other. Sometimes he said, "Siete il benvenuto,"
or used some other Italian phrase, which put me at ease with him in the
region where we were most at home together.
Looking back I must confess that I do not see what it was he found to
make him wish for my company, which he presently insisted upon
having once a week at dinner. After the meal we turned into his study
where we sat before a wood fire in winter, and he smoked and talked.
He smoked a pipe which was always needing tobacco, or going out, so
that I have the figure of him before my eyes constantly getting out of
his deep chair to rekindle it from the fire with a paper lighter. He was
often out of his chair to get a book from the shelves that lined the walls,
either for a passage which he wished to read, or for some disputed point
which he wished to settle. If I had caused the dispute, he enjoyed
putting me in the