The Vision of Sir Launfal | Page 6

a final collection of poems was published, entitled Heartsease and Rue_, which opened with the memorial poem, _Agassiz, an elegy that would not be too highly honored by being bound in a golden volume with Lycidas_, _Adonais_ and _Thyrsis. Going back to his earliest literary studies, he again (1887) lectured at the Lowell Institute on the old dramatists, Occasionally he gave a poem to the magazines and a collection of these Last Poems was made in 1895 by Professor Norton. During these years were written many of the charming Letters to personal friends, which rank with the finest literary letters ever printed and must always be regarded as an important part of his prose works.
It was a gracious boon of providence that Lowell was permitted to spend his last years at Elmwood, with his daughter, Mrs. Burnett, and his grandchildren. There again, as in the early days, he watched the orioles building their nests and listened to the tricksy catbird's call. To an English friend he writes: "I watch the moon rise behind the same trees through which I first saw it seventy years ago and have a strange feeling of permanence, as if I should watch it seventy years longer." In the old library by the familiar fireplace he sat, when the shadows were playing among his beloved books, communing with the beautiful past. What unwritten poems of pathos and sweetness may have ministered to his great soul we cannot know. In 1890 a fatal disease came upon him, and after long and heroic endurance of pain he died, August 12, 1891, and under the trees of Mt. Auburn he rests, as in life still near his great neighbor Longfellow. In a memorial poem Oliver Wendell Holmes spoke for the thousands who mourned:
"Peace to thy slumber in the forest shade,?Poet and patriot, every gift was thine;?Thy name shall live while summers bloom and fade?And grateful memory guard thy leafy shrine."
Lowell's rich and varied personality presents a type of cultured manhood that is the finest product of American democracy. The largeness of his interests and the versatility of his intellectual powers give him a unique eminence among American authors. His genius was undoubtedly embarrassed by the diffusive tendency of his interests. He might have been a greater poet had he been less the reformer and statesman, and his creative impulses were often absorbed in the mere enjoyment of exercising his critical faculty. Although he achieved only a qualified eminence as poet, or as prose writer, yet because of the breadth and variety of his permanent achievement he must be regarded as our greatest man of letters. His sympathetic interest, always outflowing toward concrete humanity, was a quality--
"With such large range as from the ale-house bench?Can reach the stars and be with both at home."
With marvelous versatility and equal ease he could talk with the down-east farmer and salty seamen and exchange elegant compliments with old world royalty. In The Cathedral he says significantly:
"I thank benignant nature most for this,--?A force of sympathy, or call it lack?Of character firm-planted, loosing me?From the pent chamber of habitual self?To dwell enlarged in alien modes of thought,?Haply distasteful, wholesomer for that,?And through imagination to possess,?As they were mine, the lives of other men."
In the delightful little poem, The Nightingale in the Study, we have a fanciful expression of the conflict between Lowell's love of books and love of nature. His friend the catbird calls him "out beneath the unmastered sky," where the buttercups "brim with wine beyond all Lesbian juice." But there are ampler skies, he answers, "in Fancy's land," and the singers though dead so long--
"Give its best sweetness to all song.?To nature's self her better glory."
His love of reading is manifest in all his work, giving to his style a bookishness that is sometimes excessive and often troublesome. His expression, though generally direct and clear, and happily colored by personal frankness, is often burdened with learning. To be able to read his essays with full appreciation is in itself evidence of a liberal education. His scholarship was broad and profound, but it was not scholarship in the German sense, exhaustive and exhausting. He studied for the joy of knowing, never for the purpose of being known, and he cared more to know the spirit and meaning of things than to know their causes and origins. A language he learned for the sake of its literature rather than its philology. As Mr. Brownell observes, he shows little interest in the large movements of the world's history. He seemed to prefer history as sublimated in the poet's song. The field of belles-lettres was his native province; its atmosphere was most congenial to his tastes. In book-land it was always June for him--
"Springtime ne'er denied?Indoors by vernal Chaucer, whose fresh woods?Throb thick with merle and