word of it, he says: “I think of writing a snub for it, having it all cut and dried, and then inserting the necessary extracts.”
I need not say that this was mere banter. But it shows the mood of the day. Privately, and to this reader only, I will venture the statement that if the most orthodox preacher who reads the “Observer” should accidentally “convey” any passage from this forgotten address into next Sunday’s sermon in the First Church of Slabville, his hearers will be greatly obliged to him and will never dream that what he says is radical. For time advances in sermons, and has its revenges.
Lowell speaks of Mr. Emerson as very kind to him. He describes a visit to him in which Lowell seems to have introduced some fellow-students. These were among the earliest of that endless train of bores who in forty years never irritated our Plato. But, alas! Lowell’s letter preserves no drop of the honey which fell from Plato’s lips. It is only a most amusing burlesque of the homage rendered by the four or five visitors. I may say in passing that the characteristics of the five men could hardly have been seized upon more vividly after they had lived forty years than they appear in the hundred words then written by this bright boy.
In the address at Concord, delivered forty-seven years afterward, he said:—
“I am not an adopted son of Concord. I cannot call myself that. But I can say, perhaps, that under the old fashion which still existed when I was young, I was ‘bound out’ to Concord for a period of time; and I must say that she treated me very kindly. … I then for the first time made the acquaintance of Mr. Emerson; and I still recall, with a kind of pathos, as Dante did that of his old teacher, Brunetto Latini, ‘La cara e buona imagine paterna,’ ‘The dear and good paternal image,’ which he showed me here; and I can also finish the quotation and say, ‘And shows me how man makes himself eternal.’ I remember he was so kind to me—I, rather a flighty and exceedingly youthful boy—as to take me with him on some of his walks, particularly a walk to the cliffs, which I shall never forget. And perhaps this feeling of gratitude which I have to Concord gives me some sort of claim to appear here to-day.”
Under Barzillai’s tuition he settled down to his college work. He had the class poem to write. As he was not to be permitted to deliver it, it may be imagined that he did not write it with much enthusiasm. He put it off, and he put it off. That was the way, it must be confessed, he sometimes met such exigencies afterward.
July 8 he wrote: “Nor have I said anything about the poem. I have not written a line since my ostracism, and, in fact, doubt very much whether I can write even the half of one.” It had been proposed that it should be read by some one else on Class Day; but to this Lowell objected, and the faculty of the college objected also. On the 23d he writes: “As for the poem, you will see the whole of it when it is printed, as it will be as soon as Scates gets back to superintend it. Do you know, I am more than half a mind to dedicate it to Bowen.” Then on the 15th of August: “I have such a headache that I will not write any more to-night, though after I go to bed I am in hopes to finish my poem. Thinking does not interfere so much with a headache as writing.” Then, on the next line: “August 18. The ‘poem’ is in the hands of the printer. I received a proof-sheet to-day from the ‘Harvardiana’ press, containing the first eight pages.” But in the same letter afterwards: “How under the sun, or, more appropriately, perhaps, the moon, which is, or appears to be, the muse of so many of the tuneful, I shall finish the poem I don’t know. Stearns came up here last Saturday, a week ago to-day, and stirred me up about the printing of it, whereupon I began Sunday to finish it in earnest, and straightway scratched off about two hundred and fifty lines. But now I have come to a dead stand and am as badly off as ever, without so much hope. ‘Nothing so difficult, etc., etc., except the end,’ you know. And here I am, as it were, at the tail end of nothing, and not a pillow of consolation whereon to lay the aching head of despair.”
LOWELL’S POEM TO HIS COLLEGE CLASS
transcription
These words are perhaps a fair enough description of the poem. It has in it a good deal of very crude satire, particularly a bitter invective against abolitionists who talked and did nothing. But the ode of the Cherokee warrior, bewailing the savage transfer of his nation which had been consummated under Andrew Jackson’s rule, seems to be worth preserving. At the time, be it remembered, the poem was most cordially received by the Lilliput circle of Boston and Cambridge:—
“Oh abolitionists, both men and maids,
Who leave your desks, your parlors, and your trades,
To wander restless through the land and shout—
But few of you could tell us what about!
Can ye not hear where on the Southern breeze
Swells the last wailing of the Cherokees?
Hark! the sad Indian sighs a last adieu
To scenes which memory gilds with brighter hue,
The giant trees whose hoary branches keep
Their quiet vigil where his fathers sleep,
’Neath the green sod upon whose peaceful breast
He too had hoped to lay him down to rest—
The woods through whose dark shades, unknown to fear,
He roamed as freely as the bounding deer,
The streams so well his boyish footsteps knew,
Pleased with the tossings of the mock canoe,
And the vast mountains, round whose foreheads proud
Curled the dark grandeur of the roaming cloud,
From whose unfathomed breast he oft has heard
In thunder-tones the good Great Spirit’s word.
Lo, where he stands upon yon towering peak
That echoes with the startled eagle’s shriek,
His scalp-tuft floating wildly to the gale
Which howls an answer to his mournful wail,
Leaning his arm upon an unbent bow,
He thus begins in accents sad and low:
“ ‘We must go! for already more near and more near
The tramp of the paleface falls thick on the ear—
Like the roar of the blast when the storm-spirit comes
In the clang of the trumps and the death-rolling drums.
Farewell to the spot where the pine-trees are sighing
O’er the flowery turf where our fathers are lying!
Farewell to the forests our young hunters love,
We shall soon chase the deer with our fathers above!
“ ‘We must go! and no more shall our council-fires glance
On the senate of chiefs or the warriors’ dance,
No
