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BY JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL, A. M., OLEATE PROFESSOR OF BELLES-LETTRES IN HARVARD COLLEGE. BOSTON: HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY. New York: 11 East Seventeenth Street. Che Vivergide Press, Cambridge, 1889. TD Gar ry f) Pa = ’ : . os ~~ € 7 oe? ~~! - } 3 Pd : - - €s Sie” ach” ae ’ * : & Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1871, < /BY‘ JAMES ‘RUSSELL LOWELL, in the‘ Office of the Libvariar. uf Congress, ‘at Washington € F € ‘ aS oc « c e* « TWENTY-EIGHTH EDITION. PREFATORY NOTE. — Y former volume of Essays has been so kindly received that I am emboldened to make an- other and more miscellaneous collection. The papers here gathered have been written at intervals during the last fifteen years, and I knew no way so effectual to rid my mind of them and make ready for a new departure, as this of shutting them between two covers where they can haunt me, at least, no more. I should have preferred a simpler title, but publishers nowadays are inexorable on this point, and I was too much occupied for happiness of choice. That which I have desperately snatched is meant to imply both the books within and the world without, and perhaps may pass muster in the case of one who has always found his most fruitful study in the open air. TO PROFESSOR F. J. CHILD. My pear Camp, — You were good enough to like my Essay on Chaucer (about whom you know so much more than I), and I shall accordingly so far presume upon our long friendship as to inscribe the volume containing it with your name. Always heartily yours, J. R. LOWELL. CAMBRIDGE, Christmas, 1870. CONTENTS. My GARDEN ACQUAINTANCE . s : : . : 1 A Goop Worp ror WINTER . - : . 24 On A CrrRTAIN ConDESCENSION IN FOREIGNERS | _ 4 Bert! A Great Pusiic CHARACTER . : - . ‘< 83 \LCARLYLE 2 F ; s A ; ‘ ; Oks ABRAHAM LINCOLN . : : ‘ ; : . 150 Tae Lire AND Letters or James Gates Percivan . 178 THOREAU . i : ‘ P : ; R é 193 Swinpurne’s TRAGEDIES ; y ‘ . n pee A? { CHAUCER . : 7 : P - ‘ 2 : 1 la Liprary oF Outp AvuTHORS . y e . ; . 290 “EMERSON, THE LecTuRER .« : . : : ; 375 | Pore ° e e e e a e e e e 385 F MY GARDEN ACQUAINTANCE. NE of the most delightful books in my father’s library was White’s Natural History of Selborne. For me it has rather gained in charm with years. I used to read it without knowing the secret of the pleasure I found in it, but as I grow older I begin to detect some of the simple expedients of this natural magic. Open the book where you will, it takes you out of doors. In our broiling July weather one can walk out with this genially garrulous Fellow of Oriel and find refreshment instead of fatigue. You have no trouble in keeping abreast of him as he ambles along on his hobby-horse, now pointing to a pretty view, now stopping to watch the motions of a bird or an insect, or to bag a specimen for the Honourable Daines Barrington or Mr. Pennant. In simplicity of: taste and natural refinement he reminds one of Walton ; in tenderness toward what he would have called the brute creation, of Cowper. I do not know whether his descrip- tions of scenery are good or not, but they have made me familiar with his neighborhood. Since I first read him, I have walked over some of his favorite haunts, but I still see them through his eyes rather than by any recol- lection of actual and personal vision. The book has also the delightfulness of absolute leisure. Mr. White seems never to have had any harder work to do than to study the habits of his feathered fellow-townsfolk, or to watch the ripening of his peaches on the wall. His volumes are the journal of Adam in Paradise, i A 2 MY GARDEN ACQUAINTANCE. * Annihilating all that’s made To a green thought in a green shade.” It is positive rest only to look into that garden of his. It is vastly better than to * See great Diocletian walk In the Salonian garden’s noble shade,” for thither ambassadors intrude to bring with them the noises of Rome, while here the world has no entrance. No rumor of the revolt of the American Colonies seems to have reached him. “ The natural term of an hog’s life’? has more interest for him than that of an empire. Burgoyne may surrender and welcome ; of what conse- quence is that compared with the fact that we can explain the odd tumbling of rooks in the air by their turning over “‘ to scratch themselves with one claw”? All the couriers in Europe spurring rowel-deep make no stir in Mr. White's little Chartreuse ; but the arrival of the house- martin a day earlier or later than last year is a piece of news worth sending express to all his correspondents. Another secret charm of this book is its inadvertent humor, so much the more delicious because unsuspected by the author. How pleasant is his innocent vanity in adding to the list of the British, and still more of the Selbornian, fauna! I believe he would gladly have con- sented to be eaten by a tiger or a crocodile, if by that means the occasional presence within the parish limits of either of these anthropophagous brutes could have been established. He brags of no fine society, but is plainly a little elated by “having considerable acquaintance with a tame brown owl.” Most of us have known our share of owls, but few can boast of intimacy with a feathered one. The great events of Mr. White’s life, too, have that disproportionate importance which is always humorous. To think of his hands having actually been thought worthy (as neither Willoughby’s nor Ray’s were) to hold MY GARDEN ACQUAINTANCE. 3 a stilted plover, the Charadrius himantopus, with no back toe, and therefore “liable, in speculation, to perpetual vacillations”! I wonder, by the way, if metaphysicians have no hind toes. In 1770 he makes the acquaintance in Sussex of “an old family tortoise,” which had then been domesticated for thirty years. It is clear that he fell in love with it at first sight. We have no means of tracing the growth of his passion; but in 1780 we find him eloping with its object in a post-chaise. The rattle and hurry of the journey so perfectly roused it that, when I turned it out in a border, it walked twice down to the bottom of my garden.” It reads like a Court Journal : “Yesterday morning H. R. H. the Princess Alice took an airing of half an hour on the terrace of Windsor Castle.” This tortoise might have been a member of the Royal Society, if he could have condescended to so ignoble an ambition. It had but just been discovered that a surface inclined at a certain angle with the plane of the horizon took more of the sun’s rays. The tortoise had always known this (though he unostentatiously made no parade of it), and used accordingly to tilt himself up against the garden-wall in the autumn. He seems to have been more of a philosopher than even Mr. White himself, caring for nothing but to get under a cabbage-leaf when it rained, or the sun was too hot, and to bury himself alive before frost, —a four-footed Diogenes, who carried his tub on his back. There are moods in which this kind of history is infi- nitely refreshing. These creatures whom we affect to look down upon as the drudges of instinct are members of a commonwealth whose constitution rests on immov- able bases. Never any need of reconstruction there ! They never dream of settling it by vote that eight hours are equal to ten, or that one creature is as clever as an- other and no more. Zhey do not use their poor wits in 4. MY GARDEN ACQUAINTANCE. regulating God’s clocks, nor think they cannot go astray so long as they carry their guide-board about with them, —a delusion we often practise upon ourselves with our high and mighty reason, that admirable finger-post which points every way and alwaysright. It is good for us now and then to converse with a world like Mr. White’s, where Man is the least important of animals. But one who, like me, has always lived in the country and always on the same spot, is drawn to his book by other occult sym- pathies. Do we not share his indignation at that stupid Martin who had graduated his thermometer no lower than 4° above zero of Fahrenheit, so that in the coldest weather ever known the mercury basely absconded into the bulb, and left us to see the victory slip through our fingers just as they were closing upon it? No man, I suspect, ever lived long in the country without being bitten by these meteorological ambitions. He hkes to be hotter and colder, to have been more deeply snowed up, to have more trees and larger blown down than his neighbors. With us descendants of the Puritans espe- cially, these weather-competitions supply the abnegated excitement of the race-course. Men learn to value ther- mometers of the true imaginative temperament, capable of prodigious elations and corresponding dejections. The other day (5th July) I marked 98° in the shade, my high- water mark, higher by one degree than I had ever seen it before. I happened to meet a neighbor ; as we mopped - our brows at each other, he told me that he had just cleared 100°, and I went home a beaten man. I had not felt the heat before, save as a beautiful exaggeration of sunshine ; but now it oppressed me with the prosaic vul- garity of an oven. What had been poetic intensity be- came all at once rhetorical hyperbole. I might suspect his thermometer (as indeed I did, for we Harvard men are apt to think ill of any graduation but our own) ; but MY GARDEN ACQUAINTANCE. 5 it was a poor consolation. The fact remained that his herald Mercury, standing a-tiptoe, could look down on mine. I seem to glimpse something of this familiar weakness in Mr. White. He, too, has shared in these mercurial triumphs and defeats. Nor do I doubt that he had a true country-gentleman’s interest in the weather- cock ; that his first question on coming down of a morn- ing was, like Barabas’s, “ Into what quarter peers my halcyon’s bill?” It is an imnocent and healthful employment of the mind, distracting one from too continual study of him- self, and leading him to dwell rather upon the indiges- tions of the elements than his own. “Did the wind back round, or go about with the sun?” is a rational, question that bears not remotely on the making of hay and the prosperity of crops. I have little doubt that the regulated observation of the vane in many different places, and the interchange of results by telegraph, would put the weather, as it were, in our power, by betraying its ambushes before it is ready to give the assault. At first sight, nothing seems more drolly trivial than_ the lives of those whose single achievement is to record the wind and the temperature three times a day. Yet such men are doubtless sent into the world for this special end, and perhaps there is no kind of accurate observa- tion, whatever its object, that has not its final use and value for some one or other. It is even to be hoped that the speculations of our newspaper editors and their myriad correspondents upon the signs of the political at- mosphere may also fill their appointed place in a well-reg- ulated universe, if it be only that of supplying so many more jack-o’-lanterns to the future historian. Nay, the observations on finance of an M. C. whose sole knowledge of the subject has been derived from a lifelong success in getting a living out of the public without paying any 6 MY GARDEN ACQUAINTANCE. equivaient therefor, will perhaps be of interest hereafter to some explorer of our cloaca maxima, whenever it is cleansed. For many years I have been in the habit of noting down some of the leading events of my embowered soli- tude, such as the coming of certain birds and the like, — a kind of mémoires pour servir, after the fashion of White, rather than properly digested natural history. I thought it not impossible that a few simple stories of my winged acquaintances might be found entertaining by persons of kindred taste. There is a common notion that animals are better meteorologists than men, and I have little doubt that in immediate weather-wisdom they have the advantage of our sophisticated senses (though I suspect a sailor or shepherd would be their match), but I have seen nothing that leads me to believe their minds capable of erecting the horoscope of a whole season, and letting us know be- foréhand whether the winter will be severe or the sum- mer rainless. I more than suspect that the clerk of the weather himself does not always know very long in ad- vance whether he is to draw an order for hot or cold, dry or moist, and the musquash is scarce likely to. be wiser. I have noted but two days’ difference in the coming of the song-sparrow between a very early and a very backward spring. This very year I saw the linnets at work thatching, just before a snow-storm which covered the ground several inches deep for a number of days. They struck work and left us for a while, no doubt in search of food. Birds frequently perish from sudden changes in our whimsical spring weather of which they had no foreboding. More than thirty years ago, a cherry-tree, then in full bloom, near my window, was covered with humming-birds benumbed by a fall of mingled rain and snow, which probably killed many of MY GARDEN ACQUAINTANCE. i¢ them. It should seem that their coming was dated by the height of the sun, which betrays them into unthrifty matrimony ; “ So nature pricketh hem in their corages ; but their going is another matter. The chimney-swal- lows leave us early, for example, apparently so soon as their latest fledglings are firm enough of wing to at- tempt the long rowing-match that is before them. On the other hand, the wild-geese probably do not leave the North till they are frozen out, for I have heard their bugles sounding southward so late as the middle of December. What may be called local migrations are doubtless dictated by the chances of food. I have once been visited by large flights of cross-bills ; and whenever the snow lies long and deep on the ground, a flock of cedar-birds comes in midwinter to eat the berries on my hawthorns. I have never been quite able to fathom the local, or rather geographical partialities of birds. Never before this summer (1870) have the king-birds, hand- somest of flycatchers, built in my orchard ; though I always know where to find them within half a mile. The rose-breasted grosbeak has been a familiar bird in Brookline (three miles away), yet I never saw one here till last July, when I found a female busy among my raspberries and surprisingly bold. I hope she was pros- pecting with a view to settlement in our garden. She seemed, on the whole, to think well of my fruit, and I would gladly plant another bed if it would help to win over so delightful a neighbor. The return of the robin is commonly announced by the newspapers, like that of eminent or notorious people to a watering-place, as the first authentic notification of spring. And such his appearance in the orchard and garden undoubtedly is. But, in spite of his name of migratory thrush, he stays with us all winter, and 1 8 MY GARDEN ACQUAINTANCE. have seen him when the thermometer marked 15 de- grees below zero of Fahrenheit, armed impregnably with- in, like Emerson’s Titmouse, and as cheerfulas he. The robin has a bad reputation among people who do not value themselves less for being fond of cherries. There is, T admit, a spice of vulgarity in him, and his song is rather of the Bloomfield sort, too largely ballasted with prose. His ethics are of the Poor Richard school, and the main chance which calls forth all his energy is altogether of the belly. He never has those fine intervals of lunacy into which his cousins, the catbird and the mavis, are apt to fall. But for a’ that and twice as muckle ’s a’ that, I would not exchange him for all the cherries that ever came out of Asia Minor. With whatever faults, he has not wholly forfeited that superiority which belongs to the children of nature. He has a finer taste in fruit than could be distilled from many successive committees of the Horticultural Society, and he eats with a relishing gulp not inferior to Dr. Johnson’s. He feels and freely exercises his right of eminent domain. His is the earli- est mess of green peas; his all the mulberries I had fancied mine. But if he get also the lion’s share of the raspberries, he is a great planter, and sows those wild ones in the woods, that solace the pedestrian and give a mo- mentary calm even to the jaded victims of the White Hills. He keeps a strict eye over one’s fruit, and knows to a shade of purple when your grapes have cooked long enough in the sun. During the severe drought a few years ago, the robins wholly vanished from my garden. I neither saw nor heard one for three weeks. Mean-- while a small foreign grape-vine, rather shy of bearing, seemed to find the dusty air congenial, and, dreaming perhaps of its sweet Argos across the sea, decked itself with a score or so of fair bunches. I watched them from day to day till they should have secreted sugar MY GARDEN ACQUAINTANCE. 9 enough from the sunbeams, and at last made up my mind that I would celebrate my vintage the next morn- ing. But the robins too had somehow kept note of them. They must have sent out spies, as did the Jews into the promised land, before I was stirring. When I went with my basket, at least a dozen of these winged vintagers bustled out from among the leaves, and alight- ing on the nearest trees interchanged some shrill re- marks about me of aderogatory nature. They had fairly sacked the vine. Not Wellington’s veterans made cleaner work of a Spanish town; not Federals or Con- federates were ever more impartial in the confiscation of neutral chickens. I was keeping my grapes a secret to surprise the fair Fidele with, but the robins made them a profounder secret to her than I had meant. The tat- tered remnant of a single bunch was all my harvest- home. How paltry it looked at the bottom of my basket, —as if a humming-bird had laid her egg in an eagle’s nest! I could not help laughing ; and the robins seemed to join heartily in the merriment. There was a native grape-vine close by, blue with its less refined abundance, but my cunning thieves preferred the foreign flavor. Could I tax them with want of taste ? The robins are not good solo singers, but their chorus, as, like primitive fire-worshippers, they hail the return of light and warmth to the world, is unrivalled. There are a hundred singing like one. They are noisy enough then, and sing, as poets should, with no afterthought. But when they come after cherries to the tree near my window, they muffle their voices, and their faint pep, pip, pop! sounds far away at the bottom of the gar- den, where they know I shall not suspect them of rob- bing the great black-walnut of its bitter-rinded store.* * The screech-owl, whose cry, despite his ill name, is one of the sweetest sounds in nature, softens his voice in the same way with the most beguiling mockery of distance. 10 MY GARDEN ACQUAINTANCE. They are feathered Pecksniffs, to be sure, but then how brightly their breasts, that look rather shabby in the sunlight, shine in a rainy day against the dark green of the fringe-tree! After they have pinched and shaken all the life out of an earthworm, as Italian cooks pound all the spirit out of a steak, and then gulped him, they stand up in honest self-confidence, expand their red waistcoats with the virtuous air of a lobby member, and outface you with an eye that calmly challenges inquiry. “Do J look like a bird that knows the flavor of raw vermin? JI throw myself upon a jury of my peers. Ask any robin if he ever ate anything less ascetic than the frugal berry of the juniper, and he will answer that his vow forbids him.” Can such an open bosom cover such depravity? Alas, yes! I have no doubt his breast was redder at that very moment with the blood of my raspberries. On the whole, he isa doubtful friend in the garden. He makes his dessert of all kinds of berries, and is not averse from early pears. But when we re- member how omnivorous he is, eating his own weight in an incredibly short time, and that Nature seems exhaust- less in her invention of new insects hostile to vegetation, perhaps we may reckon that he does more good than harm. For my own part, I would rather have his cheer- fulness and kind neighborhood than many berries. For his cousin, the catbird, I have a still warmer re- gard. Always a good singer, he sometimes nearly equals the brown thrush, and has the merit of keeping up his music later in the evening than any bird of my familiar acquaintance. Ever since I can remember, a pair of them have built in a gigantic syringa, near our front door, and I have known the male to sing almost unin- terruptedly during the evenings of early summer till twilight duskened into dark. They differ greatly in vocal talent, but all have a delightful way of crooning MY GARDEN ACQUAINTANCE. i i over, and, as it were, rehearsing their song in an under- tone, which makes their nearness always unobtrusive. Though there is the most trustworthy witness to the imitative propensity of this bird, I have only once, during an intimacy of more than forty years, heard him indulge it. In that case, the imitation was by no means so close as to deceive, but a free reproduction of the notes of some other birds, especially of the oriole, as a kind of variation in his own song. The catbird is as shy as the robin is vulgarly familiar. Only when his nest or his fledglings are approached does he become noisy and almost aggressive. JI have known him to station his young in a thick cornel-bush on the edge of the raspberry-bed, after the fruit began to ripen, and feed them there for a week or more. In such cases he shows none of that conscious guilt which makes the ‘robin contemptible. On the contrary, he will maintain his post in the thicket, and sharply scold the intruder who ventures to steal Azs berries. After all, his claim is only for tithes, while the robin will bag your entire crop if he get a chance. Dr. Watts’s statement that “ birds in their little nests agree,” like too many others intended to form the infant mind, is very far from being true. On the contrary, the most peaceful relation of the different species to each other is that of armed neutrality. They are very jealous of neighbors.