The Vision of Sir Launfal | Page 6

could have intimate relations with the best Spanish men of the time.
In England he was at once a most welcome guest, and was in great
demand as a public speaker. No one can read his dispatches from
Madrid and London without being struck by his sagacity, his readiness
in emergencies, his interest in and quick perception of the political
situation in the country where he was resident, and his unerring
knowledge as a man of the world. Above all, he was through and
through an American, true to the principles which underlie American
institutions. His address on Democracy, which he delivered in England,
is one of the great statements of human liberty. A few years later, after
his return to America, he gave another address to his own countrymen
on _The Place of the Independent in Politics_. It was a noble defense of
his own position, not without a trace of discouragement at the
apparently sluggish movement in American self-government of recent
years, but with that faith in the substance of his countrymen which gave
him the right to use words of honest warning.
The public life of Mr. Lowell made him more of a figure before the
world. He received honors from societies and universities; he was
decorated by the highest honors which Harvard could pay officially;
and Oxford and Cambridge, St. Andrews and Edinburgh and Bologna,
gave gowns. He established warm personal relations with Englishmen,
and, after his release from public office, he made several visits to
England. There, too, was buried his wife, who died in 1885. The
closing years of his life in his own country, though touched with
domestic loneliness and diminished by growing physical infirmities
that predicted his death, were rich also with the continued expression of
his large personality. He delivered the public address in
commemoration of the 250th anniversary of the founding of Harvard
University; he gave a course of lectures on the Old English Dramatists
before the Lowell Institute; he collected a volume of his poems; he
wrote and spoke on public affairs; and, the year before his death,
revised, rearranged, and carefully edited a definitive series of his
writings in ten volumes. He died at Elmwood, August 12, 1891. Since
his death three small volumes have been added to his collected writings,

and Mr. Norton has published _Letters of James Russell Lowell_, in
two volumes.
THE VISION OF SIR LAUNFAL
INTRODUCTORY NOTE
Lowell was in his thirtieth year when he wrote and published _The
Vision of Sir Launfal_. It appeared when he had just dashed off his
Fable for Critics, and when he was in the thick of the anti-slavery fight,
writing poetry and prose for The Anti-Slavery Standard, and sending
out his witty Biglow Papers. He had married four years before, and was
living in the homestead at Elmwood, walking in the country about, and
full of eagerness at the prospect which lay before him. In a letter to his
friend Charles F. Briggs, written in December, 1848, he says: "Last
night ... I walked to Watertown over the snow, with the new moon
before me and a sky exactly like that in Page's evening landscape.
Orion was rising behind me, and, as I stood on the hill just before you
enter the village, the stillness of the fields around me was delicious,
broken only by the tinkle of a little brook which runs too swiftly for
Frost to catch it. My picture of the brook in Sir Launfal was drawn
from it. But why do I send you this description,--like the bones of a
chicken I had picked? Simply because I was so happy as I stood there,
and felt so sure of doing something that would justify my friends. But
why do I not say that I have done something? I believe that I have done
better than the world knows yet; but the past seems so little compared
with the future.... I am the first poet who has endeavored to express the
American Idea, and I shall be popular by and by."
It is not very likely that Lowell was thinking of Sir Launfal when he
wrote this last sentence, yet it is not straining language too far to say
that when he took up an Arthurian story he had a different attitude
toward the whole cycle of legends from that of Tennyson, who had
lately been reviving the legends for the pleasure of
English-reading
people. The exuberance of the poet as he carols of June in the prelude
to Part First is an expression of the joyous spring which was in the
veins of the young American, glad in the sense of freedom and hope.

As Tennyson threw into his retelling of Arthurian romance a moral
sense, so Lowell, also a moralist in his poetic apprehension, made