Rat-tat-tat-tattle thru the street I hear the drummers makin' riot, An' I set thinkin' o' the feet Thet follered once an' now are quiet, White feet ez snowdrops innercent, Thet never knowed the paths o' Satan, Whose comin' step ther' 's ears thet won't, No, not lifelong, leave off awaitin'. Why, hain't I held 'em on my knee? 1 Three likely lads ez wal could be, 120 Hahnsome an' brave an' not tu knowin'? I set an' look into the blaze Come, Peace! not like a mourner bowed Whose natur', jes' like theirn, keeps But proud, to meet a people proud, climbin', Ez long 'z it lives, in shinin' ways, 1 Of Lowell's three nephews one, William_Lowell Putnam, was killed, and another, James Jackson Lowell, seriously wounded, at the battle of Ball's Bluff, the same battle in which Holmes's son was wounded (see My Hunt After the Captain '); the third, Charles Russell Lowell, died October 20, 1864, of wounds received the previous day at the battle of Cedar Creek. James Jackson Lowell recovered from the wounds received at Ball's Bluff, but was killed in the battle of Seven Pines. See Lowell's Letters, vol. i, pp. 162166; and Scudder's Life of Lowell, vol. ii, pp. 29-31. See also the note on Emerson's 'Sacrifice,' p. 95, note 1; and Colonel Henry Lee Higginson's Four Addresses, there referred to. Emerson wrote to Carlyle, October 15, 1870: The Lowell race, again, in our War yielded three or four martyrs so able and tender and true, that James Russell Lowell cannot allude to them in verse or prose but the public is melted anew.' (Carlyle-Emerson Correspondence, vol. ii, p. 374.) See also Lowell's 'Commemoration Ode,' p. 490, and Under the Old Elm,' p. 512, with the passages from his letters there quoted. 150 With eyes thet tell o' triumph tasted! Come, with han' grippin' on the hilt, An' step thet proves ye Victory's daughter ! Longin' for you, our sperits wilt Like shipwrecked men's on raf's for Heard him and stiffened; the sails heard, Bringing our robin's-leaf to deck their and wooed 1 The Commemoration services (July 21, 1865) took place in the open air, in the presence of a great assembly. Prominent among the speakers were Major-General Meade, the hero of Gettysburg, and Major-General Devens. The wounds of the war were still fresh and bleeding, and the interest of the occasion was deep and thrilling. The summer afternoon was drawing to its close when the poet began the recital of the ode. No living audience could for the first time follow with intelligent appreciation the delivery of such a poem. To be sure, it had its obvious strong points and its sonorous charms; but, like all the later poems of the author, it is full of condensed thought and requires study. The reader to-day finds many passages whose force and beauty escaped him during the recital, yet the effect of the poem at the time was overpowering. The face of the poet, always singularly expressive, was on this occasion almost transfigured, glowing, as if with an inward light. It was impossible to look away from it. Our age has furnished many great historic scenes, but this Commemoration combined the elements of grandeur and pathos, and produced an impression as lasting as life. (Underwood's James Russell Lowell, quoted in the Riverside Literature Series.) The passage about Lincoln was not in the Ode as originally recited, but added immediately after. More than eighteen months before, however, I had written about Lincoln in the North American Review, - an article which pleased him. I did divine him earlier than most men of the Brahmin caste. The Ode itself was an improvisation. Two days before the Commemoration I had told my friend Child that it was impossible, - that I was dull as a door-mat. But the next day something gave me a jog and the whole thing came out of me with a rush. I sat up all night writing it out clear, and took it on the morning of the day to Child. 'I have something, but don't yet know what it is, or whether it will do. Look at it and tell hearse grave Of the unventurous throng. me.' He went a little way apart with it under an elmtree in the college yard. He read a passage here and there, brought it back to me, and said, 'Do? I should think so! Don't you be scared.' And I was n't, but virtue enough had gone out of me to make me weak for a fortnight after. (LOWELL, in a letter to Richard Watson Gilder, January 16, 1886. Letters, Harper and Brothers, vol. ii, pp. 305–306.) I don't know how to answer your queries about my 'Ode.' I guess I am right, for it was a matter of pure instinct except the strophe you quote, which I added for balance both of measure and thought. I am not sure if I understand what you say about the tenth strophe. You will observe that it leads naturally to the eleventh, and that I there justify a certain narrowness in it as an expression of the popular feeling as well as my own. I confess I have never got over the feeling of wrath with which (just after the death of my nephew Willie) I read in an English paper that nothing was to be hoped of an army officered by tailors' apprentices and butcher-boys. The poem was written with a vehement speed, which I thought I had lost in the skirts of my professor's gown. Till within two days of the celebration I was hopelessly dumb, and then it all came with a rush, literally making me lean (mi fece magro) and so nervous that I was weeks in getting over it. I was longer in getting the new (eleventh) strophe to my mind than in writing the rest of the poem. In that I hardly changed a word, and it was so undeliberate that I did not find out till after it was printed that some of the verses lacked corresponding rhymes. All the War Poems' were improvisations as it were. My blood was up, and you would hardly believe me if I were to tell how few hours intervened between conception and completion, even in so long a one as 'Mason and Slidell." So I have a kind of faith that the Ode' is right because it was there, I hardly knew how. I doubt you are right in wishing it more historical. But then I could not have written it. I had put the ethical and political view so often in prose that I was weary of it. The motives of the war? I had impatiently argued them again and again-but for an ode they must be in the blood and not the memory. (LowELL, in a letter of December 8, 1868. Letters, Harper and Brothers, vol. ii, pp. 9-10.) See also Lowell's letter to Miss Norton, July 25, 1865; and Scudder's Life of Lowell, vol. ii, pp. 1-73, especially 63-73. For a noble description of the Commemoration procession and the exercises, see W. G. Brown's The Foe of Compromise and other Essays, pp. 197-199; quoted in Greenslet's Lowell, pp. 161-163. Many loved Truth, and lavished life's best oil Amid the dust of books to find her, Content at last, for guerdon of their toil, With the cast mantle she hath left behind her. Many in sad faith sought for her, But these, our brothers, fought for her, 1 VERITAS, the motto on the seal of Harvard University, inscribed upon three open books. See Holmes's poem Veritas,' p. 396. · 70 Is earth too poor to give us Something to live for here that shall outlive us? Some more substantial boon Than such as flows and ebbs with Fortune's fickle moon? The little that we see From doubt is never free; The little that we do Is but half-nobly true; With our laborious hiving What men call treasure, and the gods cal dross, Life seems a jest of Fate's contriving, 80 Only secure in every one's conniving, A long account of nothings paid with loss, Where we poor puppets, jerked by unseen wires, After our little hour of strut and rave, With all our pasteboard passions and desires, Loves, hates, ambitions, and immortal fires, Are tossed pell-mell together in the Ah, there is something here Unfathomed by the cynic's sneer, Something that gives our feeble light A high immunity from Night, Something that leaps life's narrow bars To claim its birthright with the hosts of heaven; A seed of sunshine that can leaven Our earthly dullness with the beams of stars, And glorify our clay A conscience more divine than we, 100 Which haunts the soul and will not let it be, Still beaconing from the heights of undegenerate years. |