Frank Preston Stearns, Cambridge Sketches

“ [92] vision of Sir Launfal,” which has become the most widely known of all his poems, and which contains passages of the purest a priori verse. Goethe, who exercised so powerful an influence on Emerson, does not appear to have interested Lowell at all.

The most plaintive of Beethoven scherzos,that in the Moonlight Sonata,--says as if it were spoken in words:

Once we were happy, now I am forlorn;
Fortune has darkened, and happiness gone.

Lowell's poetic marriage did not last quite ten years. Maria White was always frail and delicate, and she became more so continually. Longfellow's clear foresight noticed the danger she was in years before her death, which took place in the autumn of 1853. She left one child, Mabel Lowell, slender and pale like herself, and with poetical lines in her face, too, but fortunately endowed with her father's good constitution. Only ten years! But such ten years, worth ten centuries of the life of a girl of fashion, who thinks she is happy because she has everything she wants. If the truth were known we might find that in the twilight of his life Lowell thought more of these ten years with Maria White than of the six years when he was Ambassador to England,with twenty-nine dinner-parties in the month of June.