and it was a convenient loafing place. Now, let me say that from his birth to his death I never saw him in the least under any influence of liquor which could be detected in any way. I never, till within five years, heard any suggestion of the gossip which I have referred to above. There is in the letters boyish joking about cocktails and glasses of beer. But here there is nothing more than might ordinarily come into the foolery of anybody in college familiarly addressing a classmate.
It is as well to say here that a careful examination of the private records of the Faculty of the time entirely confirms the statement I have made above.
CHAPTER IV
CONCORD
Concord was then and is now one of the most charming places in the world. But to poor Lowell it was exile. He must leave all the gayeties of the life of a college senior, just ready to graduate, and he must give up what he valued more—the freedom of that life as he had chosen to conduct it. He was but just nineteen years old. And even to the gravest critic or biographer, though writing after half a century, there seems something droll in the idea of directing such a boy as that, with his head full of Tennyson and Wordsworth, provoked that he had to leave Beaumont and Fletcher and Massinger behind him—to set him to reciting every day ten pages of “Locke on the Human Understanding” in the quiet study of the Rev. Barzillai Frost. So is it—as one has to say that Lowell hated Concord when he went there, and when he came away he was quite satisfied that he had had a very agreeable visit among very agreeable people.
Concord is now a place of curious interest to travelers, and the stream of intelligent visitors from all parts of the English-speaking world passes through it daily. It has been the home, first of all, of Emerson and then of the poet Channing, of Alcott, of Thoreau, of Hawthorne, known by their writings to almost every one who dabbles in literature. It has been the home of the Hoars, father and sons, honored and valued in government and in law. Two railways carry the stream of pilgrims there daily, and at each station you find two or three carriages ready to take you to the different shrines, with friendly, well-read “drivers” quite as intelligent as you are yourself, and well informed as to the interests which bring you there.
But this page belongs to the last half-century. Lowell went to a quiet country village, the home of charming people, and a type of the best social order in the world; but to him it was simply the place of his exile. Dear Charles Brooks of Newport, who loved every grain of its sand and every drop of its spray, used to say that St. John hated Patmos only because it was his prison. He used to say that John wrote of heaven, “There shall be no more sea,” only that he might say, There shall be no chains there; all men shall be free. Lowell looked on Concord as St. John looked on the loveliness of Patmos. His boyish letters of the time steadily called it his prison or the place of his exile.
He was consigned, as has been said, to the oversight and tuition of the Rev. Barzillai Frost, in whose house he was to make his home. Mr. Frost was a scholar unusually well read, who had been an instructor in history in Harvard College, where he graduated in the year 1830. In our own time people are apt to say that Parson Wilbur, of the “Biglow Papers,” represents Mr. Frost. I do not recollect that this was said when they were published. But I dare say that the little details of Parson Wilbur’s life, the constant reference to the College Triennial Catalogue and other such machinery, may have come from the simple arrangements of the Concord parsonage. Mr. Frost had no sense of congruity. He would connect in the same sentence some very lofty thoughts with some as absurd. He would say in a Thanksgiving sermon, “We have been free from the pestilence that walketh in darkness, and the destruction that wasteth at noonday; it is true that we have had some chicken-pox and some measles.”
Imagine the boy Lowell, with his fine sense of humor, listening to Mr. Frost’s sermon describing Niagara after he had made the unusual journey thither. He could rise at times into lofty eloquence, but his sense of truth was such that he would not go a hair’s breadth beyond what he was sure of, for any effect of rhetoric. So in this sermon, which is still remembered, he described the cataract with real feeling and great eloquence. You had the mighty flood discharging the waters of the vast lake in a torrent so broad and grand—and then, forgetting the precise statistics, he ended the majestic sentence with the words “and several feet deep.”
Lowell could not help entering into conflict with his tutor, but they were both gentlemen, and the conflicts were never quarrels. In one of the earliest letters he says: “I get along very well with Barzillai (your orthography is correct), or, rather, he gets along very well with me. He has just gone off to Boston to exchange, and left me in charge of the ‘family.’ The man’s cardinal fault is that he delights to hear the sound of his own voice. When I recite Locke, he generally spends three quarters of the time in endeavoring to row up that delectable writer.” To row up, in the slang of that time, meant to row an adversary up the Salt River. The phrase was Western. “Sometimes I think that silence is the best plan. So I hold my tongue till he brings up such a flimsy argument that I can stand it, or sit it, no longer. So out I burst, with greater fury for having been pent up so long, like a simmering volcano. However, both he and his wife try to make me as comfortable and as much at home as they can. … I think it was Herder who called Hoffman’s life a prolonged shriek of thirty volumes. Carlyle borrowed the idea, and calls Rousseau’s life a soliloquy of—so long. Now I should call Barzillai’s life one stretched syllogism. He is one of those men who walk through this world with a cursed ragged undersuit of natural capacity entirely concealed in a handsome borrowed surtout of other men’s ideas, buttoned up to the chin.”
This bitterness came in early in the exile. In after times Lowell could speak of Mr. Frost more fairly. In speaking at Concord, on the celebration of the 250th anniversary of the incorporation of the town, he said:—
“In rising to-day I could not help being reminded of one of my adventures with my excellent tutor when I was here in Concord. I was obliged to read with him ‘Locke on the Human Understanding.’ My tutor was a great admirer of Locke, and thought that he was the greatest Englishman that ever lived, and nothing pleased him more, consequently, than now and then to cross swords with Locke in argument. I was not slow, you may imagine, to encourage him in this laudable enterprise. Whenever a question arose between my tutor and Locke, I always took Locke’s side. I remember on one occasion, although I cannot now recall the exact passage in Locke—it was something about continuity of ideas—my excellent tutor told me that in that case Locke was quite mistaken in his views. My tutor said: ‘For instance, Locke says that the mind is never without an idea; now I am conscious frequently that my mind is without any idea at all.’ And I must confess that that anecdote came vividly to my mind when I got up on what Judge Hoar has justly characterized as the most important part of an orator’s person.”
Of Mrs. Frost, then a young mother with a baby two months old, he says: “Mrs. Frost is simply the best woman I ever set my eyes on. Always pleasant, always striving to make me happy and comfortable, and always with a sweet smile, a very sweet smile! She is a jewel! Then, too, I love her all the better for that she loves that husband of hers, and she does love him and cherish him. If she were not married and old enough to be my mother—no! my eldest sister—I’d marry her myself as a reward for so much virtue. That woman has really reconciled me to Concord. Nay! made me even almost like it, could such things be.”
By this time, the 15th of August, the poor boy, though robbed of his vacation, was coming round to see that there were few places in the world where one would more gladly spend the summer than the Concord of his time.
But we must not look in the boy’s letters for any full appreciation of Mr. Emerson. While he was at Concord Mr. Emerson delivered an address before the Cambridge divinity school which challenged the fury of conservative divines and was only shyly defended even by people who soon found out that Emerson is the prophet of our century.
