In the period of which I am speaking, Lowell was constantly writing and pretty constantly printing, though still the superstition held that he was an idle man.To this time belongs the publication of some of his finest poems, if not their inception: there were cases in which their inception dated far back, even to ten or twenty years.He wrote his poems at a heat, and the manuscript which came to me for the magazine was usually the first draft, very little corrected.But if the cold fit took him quickly it might hold him so fast that he would leave the poem in abeyance till he could slowly live back to a liking for it.
The most of his best prose belongs to the time between 1866 and 1874, and to this time we owe the several volumes of essays and criticisms called 'Among My Books' and 'My Study Windows'.He wished to name these more soberly, but at the urgence of his publishers he gave them titles which they thought would be attractive to the public, though he felt that they took from the dignity of his work.He was not a good business man in a literary way, he submitted to others' judgment in all such matters.
I doubt if he ever put a price upon anything he sold, and I dare say he was usually surprised at the largeness of the price paid him; but sometimes if his need was for a larger sum, he thought it too little, without reference to former payments.This happened with a long poem in the Atlantic, which I had urged the counting-room authorities to deal handsomely with him for.I did not know how many hundred they gave him, and when I met him I ventured to express the hope that the publishers had done their part.He held up four fingers, "Quattro," he said in Italian, and then added with a disappointment which he tried to smile away, "I thought they might have made it cinque."Between me and me I thought quattro very well, but probably Lowell had in mind some end which cinque would have fitted better.It was pretty sure to be an unselfish end, a pleasure to some one dear to him, a gift that he had wished to make.Long afterwards when I had been the means of getting him cinque for a poem one-tenth the length, he spoke of the payment to me."It came very handily; I had been wanting to give a watch."I do not believe at any time Lowell was able to deal with money "Like wealthy men, not knowing what they give."more probably he felt a sacredness in the money got by literature, which the literary man never quite rids him self of, even when he is not a poet, and which made him wish to dedicate it to something finer than the every day uses.He lived very quietly, but he had by no means more than he needed to live upon, and at that time he had pecuniary losses.He was writing hard, and was doing full work in his Harvard professorship, and he was so far dependent upon his salary, that he felt its absence for the year he went abroad.I do not know quite how to express my sense of something unworldly, of something almost womanlike in his relation to money.
