Lowell's "Among My Books." (Second Series.)*

ALL who have at heart the interests of American literature must rejoice at receiving a new volume from Professor Lowell's pen; and the dissatisfied Professor Wilkinson himself must admit that it is the best prose book ever published by this poet. It contains his keenest and broadest criticism, his best wit, his most varied knowledge, and his most mature and harmonious writing. He still lays himself open to the charge of being sometimes, as a critic, arbitrary, whimsical, and over-vehement in censure; and of being, as a writer, uneven in his finish, and not quite patient enough of labor to master his own marvelous wealth. But that all these defects are at a minimum in this book, and his merits at a maximum, must be fairly recognized at the outset.

Indeed, the very selection of his present topics carries us into the purest air of literature, and guarantees some immunity from personalities. Mr. Lowell, it must be frankly said, can never quite be trusted to deal with his contemporaries. He came forward into literary manhood at a time when the "Noctes Ambrosiana" were considered good models, when Poe wrote criticisms, and the method of

the bowie-knife prevailed strongly in English and American literature. The young poet came in for his share of this influence, and it is indelibly stamped

ning almost to the end, simply a sharp diatribe against Mr. Masson as a literary workman. And, by a singular fatality, the American critic lays himself open to precisely the most serious charges brought against the Scottish author. He complains of Professor Masson for prolixity, and reiterates the charge with such laboriousness of statement, page after page, that not even the play of wit can save the prolonged arraignment from becoming tedious. He points out the difficulty of finding Milton among the profuse details of his biographer, forgetful of the fact that Milton plays almost as subordinate a part in the pages of the criticism. Finally, he devotes whole paragraphs to the superfluous task of proving that the Scottish editor does not always write in good taste; and then allows himself to say of Milton: "A true Attic bee, he made boot on every lip where there was a taste of truly classic honey” (page 271). The italics are our own.

And even had none of these unlucky parallelisms occurred, there are still some laws of courtesy which should prevail, if not between professor and professor, at least between authors of established position. Professor Masson is not a literary poacher or pettifogger; he belongs to the community of scholars, and has performed much literary labor, as honest and honorable as that of Mr. Lowell himself. Evidence of this may be found in his many books, and in his editorship of "Macmillan's Magazine.' He has also done a noble work in his Professorship at Edin

Faculty of Harvard College have thus far failed in doing, for he has created among his own students an ardent love for the study of Belles-Lettres. This affords, of course, no reason for withholding fair criticism; but it affords a reason for surrounding that criticism with all the courtesy that literary skill can command. Professor Lowell has abso

We must frankly admit, however, that we find great inequality in these essays-an inequality not attributable to the interval of time between the different parts, though this interval covers ten years or more, but to other causes. And it may be well to begin, after the fashion of reviewers, with the chapter we like least, that on Milton.

The immediate theme of this essay is a series of volumes relating to Milton, and published by Professor Masson of Edinburgh. Mr. Lowell says, with more or less justice, of this worthy editor: "I think he made a mistake in his very plan, or else was guilty of a misnomer in his title" (page 266). But this is exactly the criticism that the reader is disposed to bring against Mr. Lowell's essay. It is called an essay on Milton; yet it is, from the begin

Among My Books. Second Series. By James Russell Lowell, Professor of Belles-Lettres in Harvard College. Boston: J. R. Osgood & Co.

"Saturday Review" might deal with an American poet, or "The Nation" with a Sophomore.

Passing to the other essays, we find that on Wordsworth one of the very best ever written on that difficult theme; incomparably more penetrating and thoughtful than that of Mr. Whipple, with which it has been compared; and only liable to criticism in some points where the generalization seems hasty, and particular poems appear to have been overlooked or ignored. When he compares Wordsworth to “those saints of Dante who gather brightness by revolving on their own axis" (p. 250); when he says, "groping in the dark passages of life, we come upon some axiom of his, as it were a wall that gives us our bearings and enables us to find an outlet" (p. 250); when he says of "The Excursion," that "Wordsworth had his epic mold to fill, and, like Benvenuto Cellini in casting his Perseus, was forced to throw in everything, debasing the metal, lest it should run short" (p. 238); when he speaks of "the historian of Wordsworthshire "

(p. 240); when he describes the double life of the poet, as of Jeremiah and his scribe Baruch (p. 245); -he says things that could not be bettered, and there are many such things in the essay. There are also very many delicious obiter dicta, as, where he says of Goethe's Ueber allen Gipfeln ist Ruh, that "the lines, as if shaken down by a momentary breeze of emotion, drop lingeringly one after another like blossoms upon turf" (p. 214); or, where he describes the German poet Klopstock, whom Wordsworth visited, as "the respectable old poet, who was passing the evening of his days by the chimneycorner, Darby and Joan-like, with his respectable Muse" (p. 222). But, when Mr. Lowell says dogmatically of Wordsworth that "he had no dramatic power" (p. 240), we would take leave to recall to the critic's memory that extraordinary poem, "The Affliction of Margaret," than which nothing of Browning's is more absolutely real in its intensity, more utterly detached from all the individuality of Wordsworth, and all his actual or supposable experiences; than which not one of Mr. Lowell's favorite Scottish ballads has traits of more simple and picturesque vigor. Again, when he says that Wordsworth "never attained" to " severe dignity and reserved force" in his blank verse, we would venture to remind him of that glorious fragment: "There is a yew-tree, pride of Lorton Vale"-a poem which, for imagination and rhythm, is, to our thinking, far beyond Keats, beyond Landor, and finds no parallel this side of Milton. And what surprises us most is, that throughout Mr. Lowell's criticisms he wholly ignores that profoundly emotional side of Wordsworth's nature which is revealed in two poems only, "The Complaint," and the sonnet, "Why art thou Silent?"-poems without which we should have forever missed knowing the deep human sensibility which must, after all, have marked this grave poet; poems, which no critic has cited in this connection, we believe, except Mr. Lowell's old antagonist, Margaret Fuller Ossoli.-" Papers on Literature and Art," p. 167.)

With the essay upon Keats, we can find no fault, except for its shortness, and, perhaps, for a little undue censure attached to an innocent remark by Lord Houghton. The essay on Dante is the longest in the book, and is in part-thirty-four pages-a reprint of Mr. Lowell's memoir of the Italian poet in Appleton's "Cyclopædia." The combination of this with the rest involves some repetition, but the whole is too valuable to admit of complaint. Most attractive of all is the paper on Spenser, reprinted from "The North American Review;" in this, Mr. Lowell is delightful throughout, and only microscopic criticisms can be made, as upon his first apologizing (p. 171) for Spenser's occasional grossness as being a vice of the times, and then saying in conclusion that "Spenser needs no such extenuations," though others may (p. 200).

Thus much for the matter of this book; and, looking now at its style, we must repeat that, to our thinking, Mr. Lowell is here seen at his best. The whole nation has an interest in the style of its prose writers, and even in pointing out their weak

points, so long as this only holds them to their own highest standard. Mr. Lowell, while an unwearied reader, has sometimes seemed rather indolent in dealing with the details of his own literary execution. Surely a careful revision would have retouched such a sentence as this, "John Keats, the second of four children, like Chaucer and Spenser, was a Londoner" (p. 304); where we are left a moment in doubt whether the two other poets resembled Keats in birthplace or in the statistics of brothers and sisters. Nor would such revision have excused "a startling personal appeal to our highest consciousness and our noblest aspiration, such as we wait for in vain from any other poet" (p. 240); where the "such," referring grammatically to "aspiration," was plainly intended by the author to refer to "appeal." Nor should we have Mr. Lowell's indorsement (p. 231) of the opinion that Wordsworth's prose sentences were "long and involved," accompanied by such a sentence on the critic's part as this, without even a beneficent semicolon to help us through it:

"But now we must admit the shortcomings, the failures, the defects, as no less essential elements in

forming a sound judgment as to whether the seer and artist were so united in him as to justify the claim first put in by himself and afterward maintained by his sect to a place beside the few great poets who exalt men's minds, and give a right direction and safe outlet to their passions through the imagination, while insensibly helping them toward balance of character and serenity of judgment by stimulating their sense of proportion, form, and the nice adjustment of means to ends." (P. 202.)

It is fair to say that this is by far the worst senence in the book, and is an instance of the "survival" of that early habit of involved writing which was so conspicuous in Mr. Lowell's first prose book, the "Conversations." We may almost rejoice that such an example is preserved, like a schoolboy's first bad autograph, to throw out in bolder relief a superb sentence like this, where he compares Wordsworth to Milton:

"His mind had not that reach and elemental movement of Milton's, which, like the trade-wind, gathered to itself thoughts and images like stately fleets from every quarter; some deep with silks and spicery, some brooding over the silent thunders of their battailous armaments, but all swept forward in their destined track, over the long billows of his verse, every inch of canvas strained by the unifying breath of their common epic impulse." (P. 241.)

We may demur, if we please, at single words in this sentence-as "battailous," "unifying,"-but for nobleness of swell and rhythm, it might be the work of Milton himself. The book contains many shorter phrases which are marked by a similar beauty of execution. The wonder is not that there should be frequent irregularities in Mr. Lowell's prose writing, but that he should ever write so admirably, when he appears to have so little

abstract reverence for the art.

He always seems to define prose, as on pages 138, 226, 326,—as if it were merely poetry that had failed of its duty and got into disgrace. And in the mere mechanism of prose structure, we must point out one habit in which he falls far below the literary standard of Emerson, the practice, namely, of allowing part of his thought to straggle into foot-notes, instead of working it all into the main text, and leaving the notes to contain only references and citations.

In conclusion, we perceive with joy that Mr. Lowell shows no trace in this book of that cynicism which has been, perhaps, too hastily suspected in him, as the growth of advancing years. There are here no sneers at the proposition that Teague should have a note, nor is there any visible evidence of a reactionary mood. He does, indeed, say what would have come strangely from the Lowell of thirty years ago, that, "like all great artistic minds, Dante was essentially conservative" (p. 36). But, inasmuch as Professor Lowell's own period of poetic production coincided pretty closely with his period of radicalism; and as the one great poem of his maturer years, the "Commemoration Ode,"-was a pan over a completed reform, we may safely leave his artistic theory, in this respect, to be corrected by his personal example.

who

John Burroughs's "Winter Sunshine."* How many of us can boast an acquaintance speaks of all the pretty and melodious creatures of woods and fields with the sure tone of an intimate friend? Not many, it is to be feared. Yet the largest public has in Mr. Burroughs a near approach to such a charming companion, and one, moreover, who, for our delight, has condensed many hours of keen out-door enjoyment, many days of loving scrutiny of woody things, into the compass of a small book. His gentle muse is fresh, alert, and out of doors; less booky, as well as less literary, than that of Izaak Walton, for instance; but all the freer and breezier for that. Read in this hurried and overworked atmosphere of the United States, "Wake Robin" and "Winter Sunshine" give one the same deep-lunged delight that a cramped dweller in cities feels when he steps out from wholesome pine groves upon the windy summit of a mountain. This is real air, blood-quickening; these are real pages of nature, delighting the mind.

Indeed, is it not a little privilege to listen to a man who talks about foxes, we will say, as Mr. Burroughs can? How many persons speak of pretty Reynard and suffer from his craft, who in all their lives have never seen him running wild. Even the hunter needs a dog to get sight of him.

"I go out in the morning after a fresh fall of snow and see at all points where he has crossed the road. Here he has leisurely passed within rifle-range of the house, evidently reconnoitering the premises with an eye to the hen-roost. That clear, sharp track, there is no mistaking it for the clumsy footprint of a little dog. All his wildness and agility

*Winter Sunshine. By John Burroughs, Author of "Wake Robin." New York: Hurd & Houghton. 1876.

are photographed in it. Here he has taken fright, or suddenly recollected an engagement, and in long, graceful leaps, barely touching the fence, he has gone careering up the hill as fleet as the wind. "The wild, buoyant creature, how beautiful he is! This is thoroughly a winter sound,— this voice of the hound upon the mountain,—and one that is music to many ears. The long, trumpetlike bay, heard for a mile or more,-now faintly back to the deep recesses of the mountain,-now distinct, but still faint, as the hound comes over some prominent ridge, and the wind favors. "The fox usually keeps half a mile ahead, regulating his speed by that of the hound, occasionally pausing a moment to divert himself with a mouse, or to contemplate the landscape, or to listen for his pursuer. If the hound press him too closely, he leads off from mountain to mountain, and so generally escapes the hunter; but if the pursuit be slow, he plays about some ridge or peak, and falls a prey, though not an easy one, to the experienced sportsman.'

* *

About apples, there is a chapter which invests that cheap and overlooked fruit with something of the divinity which is bred of enthusiasm. Listen to this outburst over apples, this thanksgiving fitted for the whole year, and realize how well Mr. Burroughs has done to name the whole book "Winter Sunshine:"

"I love to stroke its polished rondure with my hand, to carry it in my pocket on my tramp over the winter hills, or through the early spring woods. You are company, you red-cheeked spitz, or you, salmon-fleshed greening! I toy with you, press your face to mine, toss you in the air, roll you on the ground, see you shine out where you lie amid the moss and dry leaves and sticks. You are so alive!

You glow like a ruddy flower. You look so animated, I almost expect you to move! I postpone the eating of you, you are so beautiful. How compact! How exquisitely tinted! Stained by the and varnished against the rains."

sun,

Of birds, Mr. Burroughs earned long ago the right to speak with authority, and of birds he has something good to say in this book, as well as of the pleasures and the habits of many small beasts of our woods; but the impressions made upon him by a short tour in England and a flight into France give us reason to admire his well-trained powers of observation in other and more complex fields. Of the many writers on the same country no one has approached England quite in the way he has. It is the look of the land and people which he records, the way the birds and beasts impress a new arriver, and all those other points which are, to be sure, outside, but, to a sufficiently sensitive person, not necessarily superficial. London he finds singularly countrylike, in spite of its enor mous size; Paris, pulled down, rebuilt, renovated, and centralized, he calls the handiwork of a race of citizens; admires it, but tires of it soon. Especially good are his remarks about the monotony of the fine Parisian architecture, and the following may give an idea of the lightness of his hand:

"The French give a touch of art to whatever they do. Even the drivers of drays and carts and trucks about the streets are not content with a plain, matter-of-fact whip, as an English or American laborer would be, but it must be a finely modeled stalk, with a long, tapering lash tipped with the best silk snapper. Always the inevitable snapper. I doubt if there is a whip in Paris without a snapper. Here | is where the fine art, the rhetoric of driving, comes in. This converts a vulgar, prosy 'gad' into a delicate instrument, to be wielded with pride and skill, and never to be literally applied to the backs of the animals, but to be launched to the right and left into the air with a professional flourish, and a sharp, ringing report. Everything has its silk snapper. Are not the literary whips of Paris famous for their rhetorical tips and the sting there is in them? What French writer ever goaded his adversary with the belly of his lash, like the Germans and English, when he could blister him with its silken end, and the percussion of wit be heard at every stroke?"

Of a London fog he says: "It was like a great yellow dog taking possession of the world."

As one moves through the familiar scenes which Mr. Burroughs so freshly calls to mind, the question occurs: Do people realize how he comes by this faculty of broad appreciation of great, and minute scrutiny of little things? There can be but one answer: By staying at home and giving a loving study to his own fields and forests, just as Thoreau did, and as Emerson, in his own lofty and less popular way still does. Men are said to be only moving plants after all. At any rate, they must have roots, whether these be only invisible and intangible ones, and Mr. Burroughs has struck his mental roots down into the fiber of his land. The chapter called "A March Chronicle" gives one the poetical side of a sugar-maple camp, quite delightful to consider.

As a writer, Burroughs must be assigned to the comradeship of Thoreau, Emerson, and Whitman. In some ways he looks at things very much as Whitman does, and those ways are good; but he has also caught from him-we are sure it is infection and not the outcome of a like temperament--some habits that were better dropped. Even in this charming book there are unnecessary expressions which border on the coarse, and do not add strength, while once or twice we meet absolute inaccuracies of style and grammar. One, on page 95, is the use of lay for lie; and the other, an occasional dropping of the adverb, a custom which may be colloquial, but has not yet received the sanction of liter

ature.

Quite possibly these are merely errors in reading proof, and can be readily removed in the succeeding editions which such pleasing essays merit. Perhaps a well-considered pen will then pass through such few lines as mention sea-sickness, sewers, and other things of interest to no one, and which, in a book of just this quality, pain with some show of reason the fastidious.

Barron's "Foot Notes; or, Walking as a Fine Art."

THIS is a book after the Thoreau style by a Connecticut Yankee-though born, he says, in Vermont, "in Hampshire Corner, a place well known to its inhabitants,"-who describes himself as a quasiSpiritualist, and as either the victim of a disordered fancy, or else as walking and writing under an alien influence which he more than half believes is that of the spirit of Thoreau. There can be little doubt, we think, that it is the spirit of the Concord walker, though we are loth to believe that Thoreau has become a ghost walker, and the invisible attendant and familiar of Mr. Barron. We have known persons to write as much like Tennyson, or Emerson, who certainly are not yet dogging about poor mortals for the use of their bodies. The truth is, a great deal of genius and sensibility comes into the world without any decided form or bias-without any calcareous envelope, so to speak. We do not like to call Mr. Barron's book a soft-shelled egg, but it certainly in some way suggests the simile. There is excellent meat in it, picture and thought and suggestion-real heart and substance; but for what form and cohesion it has, he seems mainly indebted to another. And it is a silly make-shift to call in the aid of Spiritualism to explain the phenomenon. If our author had never read Thoreau, then, indeed, would there be room to marvel. He says he had thought of making a book full of "homely things' before he had made the acquaintance of the Walden recluse, and it is a pity he never set about it. When he did begin to write, which was in 1864, he says he was struck by a wave of influence that made the product of his pen quite different from anything he had ever written before.

In his chapter called "Impressions," he explains the matter quite satisfactorily. "I notice," he says, "that my word has a flavor at times which indicates that the taste of some book I had eaten had not gotten out of my mouth when I spoke. May be I am like butter, which is so easily tainted by positive odors like those of leeks, or tobacco, or smoked herrings. Yet I think I am not without a certain fierce individuality. I am quite implacable when I think of one person selfishly violating the sacred personality of another who is weaker in magnetism. I have always lived a little one side, just because I did not care to have even the good enter my sphere with their influence. Still, when I look into things closely, I am compelled to admit that it is the rule of nature that the strong shall penetrate and move the weak." His "sphere," as he calls it, is a very sensitive one, and is more apt to take than to give impressions. Some of the Western towns, he says, almost tortured him with their influence. He frequently walks to New Haven, and, in a certain hollow, two and one half miles distant, his sphere and the sphere of the town invariably come in collision. He feels the town, and, perhaps, if the town knew itself, it would feel him. But the impression which the city makes upon him at that range is a good one. He says he knows that New Haven is much given to looking between the two shells of an oyster, etc.,

yet, by the aid of Yale College, it sends out an intellectual and religious influence which he can feel two and one half miles off. There is a good deal of this kind of sensibility, or impressibility, in the book, which one is at a loss whether to call a morbid and preternatural sharpness, or real poetic delicacy and spirituality. There are, undoubtedly, marks of both. Now and then we come upon crude places; our walker has not uniform good taste; we do not, on the whole, feel quite sure of him. Some parts of his experiences and confessions are not set in just the right light. It requires a very steady nerve and a certain robustness and unconsciousness for a man to talk so freely about himself without at least a slight letting down of his dignity, and Mr. Barron does not go through the ordeal with as much grace as Montaigne does, or as his own prototype Thoreau does. Perhaps he is too much of a walker, too genuine a "tramp," as he announces himself in the first sentence of his book, and makes too much of sleeping in barns and under hay-stacks.

But, after every qualification, "Foot Notes" is a valuable contribution to the literature of walking. No writer ever took more easily or naturally to the path or the open road. He has the true lightheartedness, the true walker's gait. He says he walks chiefly to visit natural objects, "but I sometimes go on foot to visit myself. It often happens when I am on an outward-bound excursion, that I also discover a good deal of my own thought. He is a poor reporter, indeed, who does not note his thought as well as his sight." He is a close and almost infallible observer of nature. We doubt if he can be detected in a single error in this direction. When he speaks of bird or beast, or of any of the lesser shows, or phases, or sounds, or odors of nature, he always has a word or two, or a whole sentence, that hits the mark fairly. True, his eye is microscopic, rather than telescopic, as was Thoreau's. magnifies the little, the common, the near-at-hand, but nearly always shows the smallest, homeliest fact surrounded by the prismatic hues of the spirit. He has none of his master's asperity and misanthropy, and he never belittles other things, the better to show off his woodchucks and muskrats. He says: "People talk a good deal as if progress in civilization meant but little more than the moving out of a hut into a palace, or the substitution of a silver fork for a steel one;" and yet he adds, that he believes the truest civilization will include a silver fork for him and his.

He

As an evidence of the firm and steady gaze which our walker turns upon things, note the chapter on "Winter Colors." How surely his eye picks out all the subtle shades and tints in the naked woods and in the different trees-garnet and amaranth, pearl and maroon. He says the limbs of the white birch seen against a dark background show like chalk lines on a black-board. The chapter on "Lichens " is a good sample of the beauty his microscopical eye everywhere reveals. Other chapters that have given us especial pleasure are on “Night Walking,” “The Legs," "Walking in the Rain," "Dirt," "Men," Ox-Teamsters," and "The Creed of a Wood

chuck." In this latter he drops into poetry, as he does in several others.

"I deem it very good luck
That I'm only a woodchuck,
For I never have to travel,
All the world over,
On stormy roads and gravel,

To get my beans and clover. I've no friends with axes

To grind,

Nor a King with taxes

To bind.

I keep no crust upon a shelf;
For in the winter I can nurse myself:

I shut my doors

To stop the bores

And sleep the while

To save my stores," etc.

This will at once recall Thoreau's "Old Marlborough Road."

There is a deal of quiet humor in the book, a warm, steady sunshine of the heart that seems native to the author. There is wisdom, too, that he has not learned of some one else. "I notice," he says, "that a man, whether he be riding or walking, is always enveloped in a cloud of thoughts and impressions which touch him only by their finest points, and which can scarcely be said to make a part of his conscious feeling, and much less of his conscious thought. All these may affect him badly, or they may be as soothing to him as any melody. Among other conclusions, I have inferred from this, that a man may have, and does have, a great deal of latent happiness; something very different from active pleasure-seeking and conscious enjoyment. I find that all our gains and victories are gradually turning themselves into this latent happiness, and that we have to make an effort from time to time in order to know just how happy we are. This is a kind of invested happiness I like."

Now and then we come upon a bit of landscape, or a group of figures, or an attitude in the book that is clearly and strongly sketched. This drawing of the "Piney-Woods Woman" of North Carolina, whither the author seems to have done some walking as a soldier, is as good as can be found anywhere:

"She was tall, lean, and sallow; her dress was made of some dingy cotton stuff; on her head she wore a sun-bonnet without starch; on her shoulders she bore the gun always so ready to bring aid to the slave-owner; she was barefooted, and when she walked she did it manfully, her heels lifting her scanty skirt behind, and her knees making vigorous thrusts against it before. She was preceded by two dogs and followed by a horse and cart which carried her husband,—a little sallow man, who looked a good deal frozen-and-thawed by the fever and ague, -two or three children, a chest, a few rude chairs, some slight tokens of bedding, and a few cooking utensils."

The book is handsomely printed and bound by the Wallingford Printing Co., and well deserves and will repay the attention of every lover of the manly art of walking.