Studies of Lowell (from Literary Friends and Acquaintance)
- Pages
- about 46
- Category
- History
- Language
- English
- Reading time
- 51 min at 250 wpm
From the opening
I have already spoken of my earliest meetings with Lowell at Cambridge
when I came to New England on a literary pilgrimage from the West in
1860. I saw him more and more after I went to live in Cambridge in 1866;
and I now wish to record what I knew of him during the years that passed
between this date and that of his death. If the portrait I shall try to
paint does not seem a faithful likeness to others who knew him, I shall
only claim that so he looked to me, at this moment and at that. If I do
not keep myself quite out of the picture, what painter ever did?
It was in the summer of 1865 that I came home from my consular post at
Venice; and two weeks after I landed in Boston, I went out to see Lowell
at Elmwood, and give him an inkstand that I had brought him from Italy.
The bronze lobster whose back opened and disclosed an inkpot and a
sand-box was quite ugly; but I thought it beautiful then, and if Lowell
thought otherwise he never did anything to let me know it. He put the
thing in the middle of his writing-table (he nearly always wrote on a
pasteboard pad resting upon his knees), and there it remained as long as
I knew the place--a matter of twenty-five years; but in all that time I
suppose the inkpot continued as dry as the sand-box.
My visit was in the heat of August, which is as fervid in Cambridge as it
can well be anywhere, and I still have a sense of his study windows
lifted to the summer night, and the crickets and grasshoppers crying in
at them from the lawns and the gardens outside. Other people went away
from Cambridge in the summer to the sea and to the mountains, but Lowell
always stayed at Elmwood, in an impassioned love for his home and for his
town.
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