There is a playful allusion in this letter to a side of Lowell’s nature which is hinted at also in his choice of correspondents. He was peculiarly dependent upon the companionship of women, and he attracted to himself the wittiest and most responsive. For it was not so much the cushioned comfort that he looked for, as the cosiness of good fellowship and the intellectual equality which he sometimes found and always prized. He loved the generous natures with whom he had good converse, and his talk and letters went freely to these habitual dwellers in a world of honest sentiment. As in so many other cases, this side of Lowell’s life found its expression in poetry, and there is no exaggeration in the sonnet “Nightwatches,” written after the death of one who had stood to him in this free, intimate relation for many years.
In August he went to Washington to close his business with the State Department, and made with great pleasure the acquaintance of Mr. Bayard, then Secretary of State, and later like him to represent the country in London. He met President Cleveland also, and saw in him “a legitimate birth of Democracy and not a byblow like Butler and his kind.”
Lowell was solicited both by the editor of the _Atlantic_ and other friends to take up again his contributions to literature, but he put them off. He had no inclination to write--he was glad of the solace of books and letters, but the spur to literary activity had been dulled. Yet he kept his Muse at least as a sort of friendly companion, as when on the seventy-fifth birthday of his neighbor and associate Dr. Asa Gray he wrote:--
“Just Fate, prolong his life well spent, Whose indefatigable hours Have been as gaily innocent And fragrant as his flowers!”
For a time he was content to drift, and to let the indolence which he had overmastered all his life get the upper hand of him now, even though the pressure of circumstance still lay heavy on him. “I am delighted,” he wrote 13 December, 1885, to Mr. John W. Field, “to hear that you are getting on so well--better than I feared--and cannot enough admire your pluck. ’Tis all the more admirable in a man like you who have the art of finding (or making) life worth living so much more than most of us. As for me I am a little tired now and then, and consent to grow old only because I can’t decently help it.... As for my coming on to Washington--I don’t know what to say. I should like to see you and Eliza, but don’t see how I can find the time at present. I have a great deal to do if I could only do it. But I am beginning to feel ‘old and slow,’ as Ulysses said to Dante. Especially do I feel slow as compared with what I once was.... I am just now bothered with an address to be given next week at the opening of a public library in Chelsea. When I have done that I mean to hold my tongue for evermore. Why should I make myself wretched when there is so much that will do it without my help?”