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 CORNELL UNIVERSITY LIBRARY 
 
 ENGLISH COLLECTION 
 
 THE GIFT OF 
 
 JAMES MORGAN HART 
 
 PROFESSOR OF ENGUSH 
 
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The date shows when this Tolume was taken. 
 
 Cornell University Library 
 PS 2331.B87 1888 
 
 .ife of James Russell Lowell, 
 
 3 1924 022 208 999 
 
Cornell University 
 Library 
 
 The original of tliis book is in 
 tine Cornell University Library. 
 
 There are no known copyright restrictions in 
 the United States on the use of the text. 
 
 http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924022208999 
 
JAMES RUSbELL LOWELL. 
 
LIFE OF 
 
 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL 
 
 /■fey'. 
 e''E" BROWN 
 
 Author of 
 Life of Jjimes A. Garfield 
 Life of Gen. U. S. Grant 
 Life of Oliver Wendell Holmes 
 and others 
 
 BOSTON 
 D LOTHROP COMPANY 
 
 FRANKLIN AND HAWLEY STREETS 
 
 T 
 
Copyright, 1887, 
 
 BY 
 
 D. LOTHROP Company. 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 Chapter- 
 
 Page. 
 
 Ancestry ; 
 
 Boyhood .... . iS 
 
 Life at Harvard 3( 
 
 Early Manhood 3I 
 
 Marriage and early PaBLiCATiONS . . 5; 
 
 VI. The Biglow Papers. — First Series . 61 
 
 VII. First European Trip 8: 
 
 Essays and Lectures 91 
 
 Atlantic Monthly . . 11 1 
 
 The Biglow Papers. — Second Series . 12! 
 Poems of the War and Under the Wil- 
 lows ... .14: 
 
 Lowell's Religious Faith . . 15 
 
 Diplomatic Service abroad . . 161 
 
 LowFLL at Westminster Abbey ... 17* 
 
 Lowell at St. Olaves . 18: 
 Longfellow Memorial at Westminster 
 
 Abbey . . . I9< 
 
 XVII., Address on Democracy . . -19: 
 
 XVIII. England's Farewell to Lowell 20 
 
 XIX. Return to the United States . . 21' 
 
 XX The Welcome Home ... 22 
 
 XXI. Various Addresses . . .24 
 
 XXII. Anecdotes and Harvard Address . . 28 
 
 XXIII. International Copyright .... 28 
 
 XXIV. Lectures at the Lowell Institute 31 
 XXV. Last Writings 32 
 
 XXVI. Last Days ... • • 33 
 
 XXVII. Lowell's Will — Tribuies — Remin scencls 34 
 
 I. 
 
 II. 
 
 III. 
 
 IV. 
 
 V. 
 
 VIII. 
 IX 
 X. 
 XL 
 
 XII. 
 XIII. 
 XIV. 
 
 XV. 
 XVI. 
 
JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 
 
 CHAPTER I. 
 
 ANCESTRY. 
 
 SAYS a certain writer, " An author cut off 
 from all his surroundings is as difficult to 
 understand as figures cut out by children and sep- 
 arated from the grouping and background of a 
 picture ; " and, with a somewhat similar feeling, 
 whenever the name of James Russell Lowell is 
 spoken, we immediately think of him at Elmwood, 
 the delightful old parsonage in Cambridge, Mass., 
 where, upon the twenty-second of February, 1819, 
 the poet was born, and where, with the exception 
 of his late residence abroad, the greater part of his 
 life has been passed. 
 
 His father, Dr. Charles Lowell, was a Unitarian 
 clergyman of the mild, conservative type — a man 
 
 7 
 
8 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 
 
 full of good works and remarkable for his unwav- 
 ering devotion to duty, his excellent judgment, 
 and his sound, practical common sense in the 
 every-day affairs of life. ' 
 
 " I may be pardoned a grain of pride," writes 
 the Rev. C. A. Bartol, " in the son of that Charles 
 Lowell, my colleague, who, for more than half a 
 century in Boston^ was an apparition of manly 
 beauty in the figure of a saint. The belfry of the 
 old building he preached in was once a Sunday- 
 school room, and sometimes a haunt of doves ; and 
 what is now known as Elmwood in Cambridge, 
 was the dear pastor's home. How little, in 1837, 
 the date of his ordaining prayer on my head, could 
 I dream that a bird of such strength of wing and 
 flaming Oriental plumage, was nestling among the 
 pines and would fly forth so boldly from the hand- 
 some — homely tower of what a remnant of wor- 
 shippers with great love, call still the West 
 Church." 
 
 At the recent celebration of the one hundred 
 and fiftieth anniversary of this famous old church, 
 Lowell himself paid a loving tribute to his father's 
 colleague : " I well remember," he said, " the day 
 when Dr. Bartol was ordained here. I was then 
 a junior in college. I remember the impression 
 made upon me that day by Dr. Bartol's face, the 
 
ANCESTRY. g 
 
 glow of enthusiasm tempered by sweetness and 
 humanity. It was a glow which, I am glad to 
 say, I still see there ; a glow which argues that the 
 emthusiasm of early life has not faded ; and that 
 this persistence, this fidelity to the dreams of 
 one's youth, if it be not the better part of genius, is 
 certainly of the same indefinable and precious es- 
 sence. ... Of the church itself, it is, so far 
 as I understand, still a church after my father's 
 own heart, who would never allow himself to be 
 called anything but a Christian." 
 
 The Lowells trace their descent from Percival 
 Lowell, or Lowle (as the name was sometimes 
 spelled), who came from Bristol, England, about 
 the year 1639, and settled in Newbury, Mass. John 
 Lowell, a descendant of Percival, who was born in 
 1704, and was graduated at Harvard in 1721, was 
 the first minister of Newburyport His son, bear- 
 ing the same name, was born in 1743, and rose to 
 prominent and influential positions in connection 
 with the organization of the State and Federal 
 Governments after the Revolution. He was a 
 leading member of the Massachusetts Convention 
 of 1780, and it is claimed by the Lowell family 
 that he was the author of the section in the Bill 
 of Rights by which slavery was abolished in Mas- 
 sachusetts. He was also a member of the Conti- 
 
10 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 
 
 nental Congress- in 1781, was made judge of the 
 Court of Appeals in 1782, and Chief -Justice of the 
 United States Court, first circuit, of 1801. One 
 of his sons was Dr. Charles Lowell, the father of 
 our poet, and another son, Francis Cabot Lowell, 
 was the first among the colonists to perceive and 
 utilize the water power of New England ; it was 
 for him that "Lowell," the city of manufactories 
 on the Merrimac River, was named. 
 
 John Lowell, Jr., a son of Francis Cabot Lowell, 
 was the founder of the Lowell Institute in Boston, 
 by which a bequest of two hundred and fifty thou- 
 sand dollars provides annual courses of free lect- 
 ures. He was born in 1779, and after receiving 
 some education in the schools of Boston went with 
 his father to Europe, and studied for awhile in the 
 high school at Edinburgh. On his return to Amer- 
 ica he entered Harvard College, when scarcely 
 fifteen years of age, but his health failing him, he 
 was unable to complete his college course. After 
 some years of travel in foreign countries, he served 
 in the legislative bodies of his State and city, and 
 devoted his leisure time to the study of scientific 
 and literary subjects. Losing by death his whole 
 family, his wife and two children, he resumed his 
 travels, and having crossed the Mediterranean, he 
 ascended the Nile, was shipwrecked in the Red 
 
ANCESTRY. II 
 
 Sea, and finally died at Bombay on the fourth of 
 March, 1836. 
 
 As one happy instance of the influence of the 
 Lowell Institute, may be mentioned the fact that 
 when Sir Charles Lyell was here to deliver his lect- 
 ures in the Lowell course, he recommended the 
 engagement of Agassiz, then a young man and 
 almost unknown in the world of science. Finding 
 such unusual advantages here for the pursuit of 
 his favorite study, the young naturalist resolved 
 to make his home in America, although when he 
 came to deliver the lectures, he had no intention 
 of remaining permanently. 
 
 The Russells, from whom the poet receives his 
 middle name, are also of English descent. Rich- 
 ard Russell came to America from Herefordshire, 
 and settled in Charlestown in 1640. He was a 
 prominent merchant, engaging largely in foreign 
 commerce. For a number of years he was repre- 
 sentative, speaker, and treasurer of the colony; 
 for twenty-six years a selectman, and for seven- 
 teen years, chairman of the board. He died in 
 1676, leaving in his will the sum of two hundred 
 pounds to be funded for the use of the poor in 
 the town, one hundred pounds to Harvard College, 
 and other legacies of a similar character. His 
 wife died soon after their arrival at the colony, 
 
12 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 
 
 and in the old burying-ground at Charlestown 
 the inscription, 
 
 MAUD RUSSELL 
 
 DECEASED, 
 1642, 
 
 may still be clearly deciphered on an old altar 
 tomb. This date is sixteen years older than any 
 inscription to be found in the old burying-grounds 
 of Boston, or indeed of any town in Massachusetts. 
 Its preservation is probably owing to the character 
 of the stone — a fine-grained gneiss. The tomb 
 of Richard was destroyed during the siege of 
 Boston, but was replaced by his descendants in 
 1 78 1, and is a true copy of the original. There 
 are six other altar tombs to different members of 
 the Russell family in this old cemetery at Charles- 
 town. One of them inscribed to the memory of 
 "James Russell," son of Richard and Maud, has 
 a deep cavity from which the sculptured coat-of- 
 arms has been taken out by the hand of some 
 desecrating vandal. It was this same son James 
 who bore so prominent and manly a part in the 
 troublesome times of 1688- 89. 
 
 The mother of James Russell Lowell was of 
 Scotch' descent, and her maiden name " Spence," 
 seems to have been the same as "Spens," — indeed 
 a certain tradition exists in the family that one 
 
ANCESTRY. 13 
 
 of their ancestors was Sir Patrick Spens, so cele- 
 brated in the old English ballad. She had a won- 
 derful gift for languages and an enthusiastic love 
 for poetry, especially for old songs and romances. 
 
 It was from her, doubtless, that James, the 
 youngest child, inherited his passion for the beau- 
 tiful both in nature and in art. As Lowell himself 
 says, in after years, " A mythology that broods 
 over us in our cradles, that mingles with the 
 lullaby of the nurse and the winter-evening legends 
 of the chimney-corner, that brightens day with 
 the possibility of divine encounters, is of other 
 substance than one which we take down from our 
 bookcase, sapless as the shelf it stood on, and 
 remote from all present sympathy with man or 
 nature as a town history. It is something like 
 the difference between live metaphor and dead 
 personification." 
 
 There were five children born to the good pas- 
 tor and his wife : Charles the eldest, who bore his 
 father's name, Robert Till Spence (the author of 
 "The New Priest in Conception Bay"), Mary 
 (now Mrs. Putnam and a lady of rare culture and 
 ability), Rebecca, who died in middle age, and 
 James Russell. 
 
 We can easily picture to ourselves the free, 
 happy, out-door hfe of the Lowell children in that 
 
14 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 
 
 most delightful of country homes, the old Elm- 
 wood parsonage. The ample grounds still cover 
 a number of acres, and the broad, grassy lawns 
 slope off into shady orchards and groves of fra- 
 grant pine and fir that in the summer time are all 
 alive with birds. There grew the yellow dan- 
 delions — those "Eldorados in the grass" — "first 
 pledges of the blithesome May," of which the poet 
 writes so lovingly : — 
 
 " My childhood's earliest thoughts are linked with thee ; 
 The sight of thee calls back the robin's song, 
 
 Who, from the dark old tree 
 Beside the door, sang clearly all day long, 
 
 And I, secure in childish piety. 
 
 Listened as if I heard an angel sing 
 
 With news from heaven, which he could bring 
 
 Fresh every day to my untainted ears 
 
 When birds and flowers and I were happy peers." 
 
 And it was of his happy childhood here at Elm- 
 wood he was thinking when he wrote : — 
 
 " Snap chord of manhood's tenses strain I 
 To-day I will be boy again ; 
 
 The robin sings as of old from the limb ! 
 
 The cat-bird croons in the lilac-bush I 
 Through the dim arbor, himself more dim, 
 
 Silently hops the hermit-thrush. 
 
 And our tall elm, this hundredth year 
 Doge of our leafy Venice here, 
 
ANCESTRY. 15 
 
 Who with an annual ring doth wed 
 The blue Adriatic overhead, 
 Shadows with his palatial mass 
 The deep canals of flowing grass. 
 
 O unestranged birds and bees I 
 
 O face of nature always true ! 
 O never-unsympathizing trees ! 
 
 O never-rejecting roof of blue, 
 Whose rash disherison never falls 
 On us unthinking prodigals, 
 Yet who convictest all our ill, 
 So grand and unappeasable ! 
 Methinks my heart from each of these 
 
 Plucks part of childhood back again, 
 Long there imprisoned, as the breeze 
 
 Doth every hidden odor seize 
 Of wood and water, hill and plain ; 
 Once more am I admitted peer 
 In the upper house of nature here, 
 And feel through all my pulses run 
 The royal blood of breeze and sun.'' 
 
 Elmwood itself has an interesting history. 
 Originally the Stratton estate, it was bought by 
 Thomas Oliver, the Lieutenant-Governor of Mas- 
 sachusetts in the year 1790. The estate consisted 
 of fifteen acres, for which the sum of one hundred 
 and thirty-eight pounds sterling was paid. The 
 house, a large, square, three-storied edifice, some- 
 what resembles the Craigie Mansion in its general 
 plan of architecture. It is painted yellow with 
 
1 6 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 
 
 white trimmings, faces the east, is embowered 
 with trees, and stands some distance back from 
 the street. Most of the elms which gave to this 
 beautiful country seat the name of "Elmwood," 
 are of the English variety which, in their sturdy 
 growth, may be easily distinguished from our na- 
 tive trees. 
 
 A thick hedge of pines, willows, and horse-chest- 
 nuts, filled in with a great variety of shrubs, sur- 
 rounds the enclosure, and in the rear is a grove of 
 noble oaks which sprang from acorns planted by 
 the poet's father. When the "obnoxious Olivers " 
 were obliged to leave the country, "being waited 
 upon by a Boston committee of four thousand," 
 the house was bought by Elbridge Gerry, a man 
 of considerable note in his day, and from whose 
 crooked plan of districting, the term "gerryman- 
 dering" was coined. In the year 1818 the house 
 was bought by Dr. Lowell. 
 
 The "herons of Elmwood" still fly back and 
 forth between the pines and the marshes, though 
 only four miles distant to the east, may be seen 
 the spires and roofs of Boston : — 
 
 " Below, the Charles — a stripe of nether sky, 
 Now hid by rounded apple-trees between, 
 
 Whose gaps the misplaced sail sweeps bellying by, 
 Now flickering golden through a woodland screen, 
 
ANCESTRY. 17 
 
 Then spreading out, at his next turn beyond, 
 
 A silver circle like an inland pond — 
 
 Slips seaward silently through marshes purple and green." 
 
 " There gleams my native village, dear to me, 
 
 Though higher change's waves each day are seen, 
 Whelming fields famed in boyhood's history, 
 Sanding with houses the diminished green ; 
 There, in red brick, which softening time defies. 
 Stand square and stiff the Muses' factories ; — 
 How with my life lit up is every well-known scene I " 
 
 So writes Lowell, as the beautiful view from the 
 study windows at Elmwood rises before him. And 
 what warm affection for the old home is expressed 
 in the succeeding stanza : 
 
 " Flow on, dear river I not alone you flow 
 
 To outward sight, and through your marshes wind ; 
 
 Fed from the mystic springs of long ago, 
 Your twin flows silent through my world of mind : 
 
 Grow dim, dear marshes, in the evening's gray 1 
 
 Before my inner sight ye stretch away. 
 
 And will forever, though these fleshy eyes grow blind." 
 
CHAPTER II. 
 
 BOYHOOD. 
 
 OF Cambridge in the early days of Lowell we 
 have a delightful picture from his own pen. 
 "Boston," he says, "was not then a city, and 
 Cambridge was still a country village, with its own 
 habits and traditions, not yet feeling too strongly 
 the force of suburban gravitation. Approaching 
 it from the west by what was then called the New 
 Road, you would pause on the brow of Symonds' 
 Hill to enjoy a view singularly soothing and placid. 
 In front of you lay the town, tufted with elms, 
 lindens, and horse-chestnuts, which had seen Mas- 
 sachusetts a colony, and were fortunately unable 
 to emigrate with the Tories by whom, or by whose 
 fathers they were planted. Over it rose the noisy 
 belfry of the church, and the slim yellow spire of 
 the parish meeting-house, by no means ungraceful, 
 and then an invariable characteristic of New Eng- 
 land religious architecture. On your right the 
 Charles slipped smoothly through green and purple 
 salt-meadows, darkened, here and there, with the 
 
 i8 
 
BOYHOOD. ig 
 
 blossoming black-grass as with a stranded cloud- 
 shadow. Over these marshes, level as water, but 
 without its glare, and with softer and more sooth- 
 ing gradations of perspective, the eye was carried 
 to a horizon of softly-rounded hills. To your left 
 hand, upon the Old Road, you saw some half-dozen 
 dignified old houses of the colonial time, all com- 
 fortably fronting southward. If it were early June, 
 the rows of horse-chestnuts along the fronts of 
 these houses showed through every crevice of their 
 dark heap of foliage, and on the end of every 
 drooping limb, a cone of pearly flowers, while the 
 hill behind was white or rosy with the crowding 
 blooms of various fruit trees. ... A few 
 houses, chiefly old, stood around the bare Com- 
 mon, with ample elbow-room, and old women, 
 capped and spectacled, still peered through the 
 same windows from which they had watched Lord 
 Percy's artillery rumble by to Lexington, or caught 
 a glimpse of the handsome Virginia General who 
 had come to wield our homespun Saxon chivalry. 
 People were still living who regretted the late un- 
 happy separation from the mother island, who had 
 seen no gentry since the Vassals went, and who 
 thought that Boston had ill kept the day of her 
 patron-saint, Botolph, on the seventeenth of June, 
 1775. The hooks were to be seen from which had 
 
20 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 
 
 hung the hammocks of Burgoyne's captive red- 
 coats. If memory does not deceive me, women 
 still washed clothes in the town spring, clear as 
 that of Bandusia. One coach sufficed for all the 
 travel to the metropolis." 
 
 Like all boys, his visits to the barber's shop 
 were marked with a " red letter : " 
 
 " The boy who was to be clipped there, was al- 
 ways accompanied to the sacrifice by a troop of 
 friends, who thus inspected the curiosities gratis. 
 While the watchful eye of R. wandered to keep 
 in check these rather unscrupulous explorers, the 
 unpausing shears would sometimes overstep the 
 boundaries of strict tonsorial prescription and make 
 a notch through which the phrenological devel- 
 opments could be distinctly seen. As Michael 
 Angelo's design was modified by the shape of his 
 block, so R., rigid in artistic properties, would con- 
 trive to give an appearance of design to this aberra- 
 tion, by making it the key-note to his work, and 
 reducing the whole head to an appearance of pre- 
 mature baldness. What a charming place it was, 
 — how full of wonder and delight! The sunny 
 little room, fronting southwest upon the Common, 
 rang with canaries and Java sparrows, nor were 
 the familiar notes of robin, thrush and bobo- 
 link wanting. A large white cockatoo harangued 
 
BOYHOOD. 21 
 
 vaguely, at intervals, in what we believed (on R's 
 authority) to be the Hottentot language. He had 
 an unveracious air, but what inventions of former 
 grandeur he was indulging in, what sweet South 
 African Argos he was remembering, what tropical 
 heats and giant trees by unconjectured rivers, 
 known only to the wallowing hippopotamus, we 
 could only guess at. The walls were covered with 
 curious old Dutch prints, beaks of albatross and 
 penguin, and whales' teeth fantastically engraved. 
 There was Frederick the Great, with head drooped 
 plottingly, and keen side-long glance from under 
 the three-cornered hat. There hung Bonaparte, 
 too, the long-haired haggard general of Italy, his 
 eyes sombre with prefigured destiny: and there 
 was his island grave; — the dream and the fulfil- 
 ment. Good store of sea-fights there was also ; 
 above all Paul Jones in the Bonhomme Richard : 
 the smoke rolling courteously to leeward, that we 
 might see him dealing thunderous wreck to the 
 two hostile vessels, each twice as large as his own, 
 and the reality of the scene corroborated by streaks 
 of red paint leaping from the mouth of every gun. 
 Suspended over the fire-place with the curling- 
 tongs, were an Indian bow and arrows, and in the 
 corners of the room stood New Zealand paddles 
 and war-clubs quaintly carved. The model of a 
 
22 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 
 
 ship in glass we variously estimated to be worth 
 from a hundred to a thousand dollars, R. rather 
 favoring the higher valuation, though never dis- 
 tinctly committing himself. Among these won- 
 ders, the only suspicious one was an Indian 
 tomahawk, which had too much the peaceful look 
 of a shingling-hatchet. Did any rarity enter the 
 town, it gravitated naturally to these walls, to the 
 very nail that waited to receive it, and where, 
 the day after its accession, it seemed to have hung 
 a lifetime. 
 
 " We always had a theory that R. was immensely 
 rich (how could ,,he possess so much and be othef- 
 wise .'), and that he pursued his calling from an 
 amiable eccentricity. He was a conscientious ar- 
 tist, and never submitted it to the choice of his 
 victim whether he would be perfumed or not. 
 Faithfully was the bottle shaken and the odorif- 
 erous mixture rubbed in, a fact redolent to the 
 whole schoolroom in the afternoon. Sometimes 
 the persuasive tonsor would impress one of the 
 attendant volunteers, and reduce his poll to shoe- 
 brush crispness, at cost of the reluctant nine-pence 
 hoarded for Fresh Pond and the next half-holiday. 
 So purely indigenous was our population then, that 
 R. had a certain exotic charm, a kind of game 
 flavor by being a Dutchman." 
 
BOYHOOD. 23 
 
 The poet's first experience of school-life is thus 
 graphically recalled in after years : 
 
 "Passing through some Massachusetts village, 
 perhaps at a distance from any house, it may be 
 in the midst of a piece of woods where four roads 
 meet, one may sometimes even yet see a small 
 square one-story building, whose use would not be 
 long doubtful. It is summer, and the flickering 
 shadows of forest-leaves dapple the roof of the 
 little porch, whose door stands wide, and shows, 
 hanging on either hand, rows of straw hats and 
 bonnets that look as if they had done good service. 
 As you pass the open windows, you hear whole pla- 
 toons of high-pitched voices discharging words of 
 two or three syllables with wonderful precision 
 and unanimity. Then there is a pause and the 
 voice of the officer in command is heard reproving 
 some raw recruit whose vocal musket hung fire. 
 Then the drill of the small infantry begins anew, 
 but pauses again because some urchin' — who agrees 
 with Voltaire that the superfluous is a very neces- 
 sary thing — insists on spelling 'subtraction' with 
 an s too much. 
 
 " If you had the good fortune to be born and bred 
 in the Bay State, your mind is thronged with half- 
 sad, half-humorous recollections. The a-b abs of 
 little voices long since hushed in the world, or 
 
24 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 
 
 ringing now in the pulpit, at the bar, or in the 
 Senate Chamber, come back to the ear of memory. 
 You remember the high stool on which culprits 
 used to be elevated with the tall paper fool's-cap 
 on their heads, blushing to the ears ; and you think 
 with wonder how you have seen them since as men 
 climbing the world's penance-stools of ambition 
 without a blush, and gladly giving everything for 
 life's caps and bells. And you have pleasanter 
 memories of going after pond-lilies, of angling for 
 horn-pouts, — that queer bat among the fishes, — 
 of nutting, of walking over the creaking snow-crust 
 in winter, when the warm breath of every house- 
 hold was curling up silently in the keen blue air. 
 You wonder if life has any rewards more solid and 
 permanent than the Spanish dollar that was hung 
 around your neck to be restored again next day, 
 and conclude sadly that it was but too true a pro- 
 phecy and emblem of all worldly success. But 
 your moralizing is broken short off by a rattle of 
 feet and the pouring forth of the whole swarm, — 
 the boys dancing and shouting, — the mere effer- 
 vescence of the fixed air of youth and animal spirits 
 uncorked, — the sedater girls in confidential twos 
 and threes descanting secrets out of the mouth of 
 one cape-bonnet into that of another. Times have 
 changed since the jackets and trousers used to 
 
BOYHOOD. 2S 
 
 draw up on one side of the road, and the petticoats 
 on the other, to salute with bow and courtesy the 
 white neck-cloth of the parson or the squire, if it 
 chanced to pass during intermission." 
 
 After a brief experience in one of these district 
 schools, the little fellow was sent to a somewhat 
 more pretentious hall of learning. William Wells, 
 a finely educated Englishman and a former mem- 
 ber of the well-known Boston publishing house. 
 Wells & Lilly, opened a boys' school in Cambridge, 
 not far from the Elmwood parsonage, and it was 
 here that the young poet received the greater part 
 of his early education. 
 
 We must not forget, however, that from his very 
 cradle he had been nurtured with old ballads and 
 romances. Add to this the refining influence of 
 his ideal home where the beautiful both in Nature 
 and in Art was constantly before him, and we 
 can better understand the rapid development of 
 those — 
 
 " wild germs of higher birth 
 
 Which in the poet's tropic heart bear flowers 
 
 Whose fragrance fills the earth." 
 
 Like all boys he had the inevitable, though for- 
 tunately transitory passion in his case for " a life 
 on the ocean wave." The maritime trade of Cam- 
 
26 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 
 
 bridge at that time was " intrusted to a single Argo, 
 the sloop Harvard which belonged to the College 
 and made annual voyages to that vague Orient 
 known as Down East, bringing back the wood that, 
 in those days gave to winter life at Harvard a 
 crackle and a cheerfulness, for the loss of which 
 the greater warmth of anthracite hardly compen- 
 sates. 
 
 "New England life, to be geniiine, must have 
 in it some sentiment of the sea, — it was this in- 
 stinct that printed the device of the pine-tree on 
 the old money and the old flag, — and these peri- 
 odic ventures of the sloop Harvard made the old 
 Viking fibre vibrate in the hearts of all the village 
 boys. What a vista of mystery and adventure did 
 her sailing open to us ! With what pride did we hail 
 her return ! She was our scholiast upon Robinson 
 Crusoe and the Mutiny of the Bounty. Her cap- 
 tain still lords it over our memories, the greatest 
 sailor that ever sailed the seas, and we should not 
 look at Sir John Franklin himself with such admir- 
 ing interest as that with which we enhaloed some 
 larger boy who had made a voyage in her and had 
 come back without braces ( gallowses, we called 
 them) to his trousers, and squirting ostentatiously 
 the juice of that weed which still gave him little 
 private returns of something very like seasickness. 
 
BOYHOOD. 27 
 
 All our shingle vessels were shaped and rigged by 
 her, who was our glass of naval fashion and our 
 mould of aquatic form. We had a secret and wild 
 delight in believing that she carried a gun, and 
 imagined her sending grape and canister among 
 the treacherous savages of Oldtown. Inspired by 
 her were those first essays at navigation on the 
 Winthrop duck-pond, of the plucky boy who was 
 afterwards to serve two famous years before the 
 mast. 
 
 "The greater part of what is now Cambridgeport 
 was then (in the native dialect) a huckleberty past- 
 ure. Woods were not wanting on its outskirts, of 
 pine, and oak, and maple, and the rarer tupelo with 
 downward limbs. Its veins did not draw their blood 
 from the quiet old heart of the village, but it had 
 a distinct being of its own, and was rather a great 
 caravansary than a suburb. The chief feature of 
 the place was its inns, of which there were five, 
 with vast barns and court-yards, which the railroad 
 was to make as silent and deserted as the palaces 
 of Nimrod. 
 
 " Great white-topped wagons, each drawn by 
 double files of six or eight horses, with its dusty 
 bucket swinging from the hinder axle, and its grim 
 bull-dog trotting silent underneath, or in midsum- 
 mer panting on the lofty perch beside the driver 
 
28 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 
 
 (how elevated thither baffled conjecture), brought 
 all the wares and products of the country to their 
 mart and seaport in Boston. These filled the inn- 
 yards or were ranged side by side under broad- 
 roofed sheds, and far into the night the mirth of 
 their lusty drivers clamored from the red-curtained 
 bar-room, while the single lantern, swaying to and 
 fro in the black tavern of the stables, made a Rem- 
 brandt of the group of ostlers and horses below. 
 There were, besides the taverns, some huge square 
 stores where groceries were sold, some houses, by 
 whom or why inhabited was to us boys a problem, 
 and on the edge of the marsh, a currier's shop, 
 where at high tide, on a floating platform, men 
 were always beating skins in a way to remind one 
 of Don Quixote's fulling-mills." 
 
 And there were the two groceries " where E. & 
 W. I. goods and country "^xodooce were sold with 
 an energy mitigated by the quiet genius of the 
 place, and where strings of urchins waited, each 
 with a cent in hand, for the unweighed dates (thus 
 giving an ordinary business transaction all the ex- 
 citement of a lottery) and buying not only that 
 cloying sweetness, but a dream also of Egypt, and 
 palm-trees, and Arabs, in which vision a print of 
 the Pyramids in our geography tyrannized like that 
 taller thought of Cowper's." 
 
BOYHOOD. 29 
 
 And so the happy days of boyhood glided by, the 
 school-Hfe in Cambridge varied by a few months 
 preparatory study at Mr. Ingraham's classical 
 school in Boston where the bright lad was fitted 
 for an entrance into Harvard College in his six- 
 teenth year. 
 
I 
 
 CHAPTER III. 
 
 LIFE AT HARVARD. 
 
 N Lowell's fine poem to Oliver Wendell Holmes 
 on his seventy-fifth birthday, he says : 
 
 " Ten years my senior, when my name 
 In Harvard's entrance book was writ, 
 
 Her halls still echoed with the fame 
 Of you her poet and her wit. 
 
 One air gave both their lease of breath ; 
 
 The same paths lured our boyish feet ; 
 One earth will hold us safe in death, 
 
 With dust of saints and scholars sweet. 
 
 Our legends from one source were drawn, 
 I scarce distinguish yours from mine, 
 
 And don't we make the Gentiles yawn 
 With ' You remembers ? ' o'er our wine I 
 
 If I with too seneschent air. 
 
 Invade your elder memory's pale, 
 You snub me with a pitying ' Where 
 
 Were you in the September Gale ? ' 
 
 Both stared entranced at Lafayette, 
 
 Saw Jackson dubbed with LL. D. 
 What Cambridge saw not strikes us yet 
 
 As scarcely worth one's while to see.'' 
 3° 
 
LIFE AT HARVARD. 31 
 
 Commencement Day at Harvard was one of the 
 great events of the year to the young " Cantabrigi- 
 ans born under the shadow of the College walls." 
 
 "The year," says Holmes, "had nothing for us 
 boys like 'the tents.' Tuesday night was to us 
 like the evening before Agincourt. We heard 
 the hammers late in the evening, we heard them 
 early in the morning as we looked out of the west 
 window to see if ' the tents were going to spread 
 over as wide a surface as in other remembered 
 years. The sun crawled slowly up in the sky, like 
 a golden tortoise, — how long a day was then ! At 
 last the blare of a trumpet ! The Governor was 
 coming, guarded by his terrible light-horse troop, 
 protected too by his faithful band of mounted truck- 
 men from Boston, sturdy men on massive steeds in 
 white frocks all, a noble show of broad shoulders 
 
 and stout arms It was the end of 
 
 August, you remember, and the peaches were ripe, 
 and the early apples and pears, and chief among 
 the fruits of the season, that bounteous one which 
 a College poet thus celebrated in the year 181 1 : — ■ 
 
 ' The smaller melons go for each one's need, 
 The children have them or they go to seed ; 
 But this great melon waits Commencement Day, 
 Mounts the tall cart, to Cambridge takes its way ; 
 There, proud conclusion of its happy days, 
 A graduate's palate murmurs forth its praise.' 
 
32 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 
 
 "So sung Edward Everett, Senior Sophister 
 aged seventeen." 
 
 " Not least among the curiosities which the day 
 brought together," writes Lowell, " were some of 
 the graduates, posthumous men, as it were, disen- 
 tombed from country parishes and district schools, 
 but perennial also, in whom freshly survived all 
 the college jokes, and who had no intelligence later 
 than their Senior year. These had gathered to eat 
 the College dinner, and to get the Triennial Cata- 
 logue (their libra d'oro) referred to oftener than any 
 volume but the Concordance. Aspiring men they 
 were, certainly, but in a right, unworldly way ; this 
 scholastic festival opening a peaceful path to the 
 ambition which might else have devastated man- 
 kind with Prolusions on the Pentateuch, or Gene- 
 alogies of the Dormouse Family. For since in the 
 academic processions the classes are ranked in the 
 order of their graduation, and he has the best 
 chance at the dinner who has the fewest teeth to 
 eat with, so, by degrees, there springs up a com- 
 petition in longevity, — the prize contended for 
 being the oldest surviving graduateship. This 
 is an office, it is true, without emolument, but 
 having certain advantages, nevertheless. The in- 
 cumbent, if he come to Commencement, is a pro- 
 digious lion, and commonly gets a paragraph in 
 
LIFE AT HARVARD. 33 
 
 the newspaper once a year with the (fiftieth) last 
 survivor of Washington's Life-Guard. If a clergy- 
 man, he is expected to ask a blessing and return 
 thanks at the dinner, a function which he performs 
 with centenarian longanimity, as if he reckoned 
 the ordinary life of man to be fivescore years, and 
 that a grace must be long to reach so far away as 
 heaven. Accordingly this silent race is watched, 
 on the course of the Catalogue, with an interest 
 worthy of Newmarket ; and as star after star rises 
 in the galaxy of death, till one name is left alone, 
 an oasis of life in the stellar desert, it grows sol- 
 emn. The natural feeling is reversed, and it is 
 the solitary life that becomes sad and monitory, 
 the Stylites there on the lonely top of his century- 
 pillar, who has heard the passing-bell of youth, 
 love, friendship, hope, — of everything but immiti- 
 gable eld." 
 
 Looking back upon his college days at Harvard, 
 Lowell pays the following tribute to President 
 Quincy : 
 
 "Almost everybody looks back regretfully to 
 the days of some Consul Plancus. Never were 
 eyes so bright, never had wine so much wit and 
 good-fellowship in it, never were we ourselves so 
 capable of the various great things we have never 
 done. Nor is it merely the sunset of life that casts 
 
34 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 
 
 such a ravishing light on the past, and makes the 
 western windows of those homes of fancy we have 
 left forever, tremble with a sentiment of such 
 sweet regret. We set great store by what we had, 
 and cannot have again, however indifferent in it- 
 self, and what is past is infinitely past. This is 
 especially true of college life, when we first assume 
 the titles without the responsibilities of manhood, 
 and the President of our year is apt to become our 
 Plancus very early. Popular or not while in office, 
 an ex-president is always sure of enthusiastic cheers 
 at every college festival. Mr. Quincy had many 
 qualities calculated to win favor with the young — 
 that one above all which is sure to do it, indomita- 
 ble pluck. With him, the dignity was in the man, 
 not in the office. He had some of those little 
 oddities, too, which afford amusement without con- 
 tempt, and which rather heighten than diminish 
 personal attachment to superiors in station. His 
 punctuality at prayers, and in dropping asleep there, 
 his forgetfulness of names, his singular inability to 
 make even the shortest off-hand speech to the stu- 
 dents — all the more singular in a practised orator 
 — his occasional absorption of mind, leading him 
 to hand you his sand-box instead of the leave of 
 absence he had just dried with it — the old-fash- 
 ioned courtesy of his, 'Sir, your servant,' as he 
 
LIfE AT HARVARD. 35 
 
 bowed you out of his study — all tended to make 
 him popular. He had also a little of what is some- 
 what contradictorily called dry humor, not without 
 influence in his relations with the students. In 
 taking leave of the graduating class, he was in the 
 habit of paying them whatever honest compliment 
 he could. Who, of a certain year which shall be 
 nameless, will ever forget the gravity with which 
 he assured them that they were 'the best-dressed 
 class that had passed through college during his 
 administration .' ' How sincerely kind he was, how 
 considerate of youthful levity, will always be grate- 
 fully remembered by whoever had occasion to ex- 
 pedience it. A visitor not long before his death 
 found him burning some memoranda of college 
 peccadilloes, lest they should ever rise up in judg- 
 ment against the men eminent in Church and 
 State who had been guilty of them. One great 
 element of his popularity with the students was 
 his esprit de corps. However strict in discipline, 
 he was always on our side as respected the outside 
 world. Of his efficiency, no higher testimony could 
 be asked than that of his successor, Dr. Walker. 
 Here also many reforms date from his time. He 
 had that happiest combination for a wise vigor in 
 the conduct of affairs, — he was a conservative 
 with an open mind." 
 
36 LIFE AT harvard: 
 
 Among the classmates of Lowell, were William 
 W. Story, the sculptor and poet, Charles Devens, 
 a general in the Civil War, and now a judge of 
 the Supreme Court ; the Rev. Rufus Ellis, Hon. 
 George B. Loring ; the late Professor Nathan Hale 
 (Edward Everett Hale was in the class following) ; 
 Prof. H. L. Eustis ; Prof. W. P. Atkinson ; and the 
 Rev. J. I. T. Coolidge. 
 
 Although not remarkable for his rank in schol- 
 arship while at Harvard, Lowell was elected Class 
 Poet, and his poem bears this unique dedication, 
 "To the Class of 1838, some of whom he loves, 
 none of whom he hates, this ' poem ' is dedicated 
 by their classmate." 
 
CHAPTER IV. 
 
 EARLY MANHOOD. 
 
 AFTER his graduation at Harvard College, 
 Lowell entered the Law School, and took 
 his degree of LL. B. in 1840. He opened an office 
 at No. 4 Court Street, in Boston, but the profes- 
 sion of law was little suited to his tastes, and 
 he soon abandoned it for literature. "Are not 
 our educations," he says, "commonly like a pile of 
 books laid over a plant in a pot ? The compressed 
 nature struggles through at every crevice, but can 
 never get the cramp and stunt out of it. We spend 
 all our youth in building a vessel for our voyage of 
 life, and set forth with streamers flying ; but the 
 moment we come nigh the great loadstone mount- 
 ain of our proper destiny, out leap all our carefully 
 driven bolts and nails, and we get many a mouthful 
 of good salt brine, and many a buffet of the rough 
 water of experience, before we secure the bare right 
 to live." A story for the "Boston Miscellany," 
 entitled " My First Client," was written by the 
 young lawyer at this time, and just before his 
 
 37 
 
38 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 
 
 twenty-second birthday he published a volume of 
 poems, to which he gave the title "A Year's Life." 
 Although many of the poems in this first book 
 are discarded in after years in the author's " com- 
 plete" collection, some of them have never been 
 surpassed in beauty of thought and felicity of ex- 
 pression. "Irene," for instance, — "My Love," 
 and " The Beggar," are poems that the world will 
 never let die, and many passages from the sonnets 
 published with these earlier songs, have already 
 passed into household proverbs. The motto for 
 this little book, Ich habe gelebt zmd gcliebt, taken 
 from Schiller, gives the true key-note of the young 
 poet's inspiration. Despite the cold, disparaging 
 criticism of Margaret Fuller in "The Dial," both 
 imagery and music were the writer's own, and 
 his distinctive originality was soon to receive a 
 world-wide recognition. Before the publication 
 of his next volume, Lowell, with his friend Rob- 
 ert Carter, an eccentric genius, launched upon 
 the sea of periodical literature a new magazine 
 called "The Pioneer." It was finely printed and 
 illustrated, and numbered among its contributors 
 Hawthorne, Whittier, Poe, and other writers who 
 have since become famous ; but the young editors, 
 who were also the proprietors, had more literary 
 talent than business experience, and after the pub- 
 
EARLY MANHOOD. 30 
 
 lication of three numbers, "The Pioneer" was dis- 
 continued for want of patronage. It was, indeed, 
 too far ahead of its age. The general reading pub- 
 lic could not appreciate such incomparable stories 
 as Hawthorne's " Hall of Fantasy," or the exquisite 
 melody of a poem like "Lenore." 
 
 It is my good fortune to own one of these rare 
 numbers of "The Pioneer," bound in an old time- 
 worn volume with copies of the " Boston Miscel- 
 lany." This latter periodical to which Lowell was 
 a frequent contributor, was almost as short-lived 
 as its predecessor. " The reason for this," writes 
 Rev. Edward E. Hale, brother of Nathan Hale, Jr., 
 the editor, " was that its publishers had no capital. 
 They had to resort to the clap-trap of fashion plates 
 and other engravings, in the hope of forcing an im- 
 mediate sale upon persons, who caring for fashion 
 plates, did not not care for the literary character 
 of the enterprise. It gave a happy escape pipe, 
 however, for the high spirits of some of us who had 
 just left college ; and, through my brother's kind- 
 ness, I was sometimes permitted to contribute to 
 the journal." 
 
 In this number of " The Pioneer," which is be- 
 fore me as I write, is a most delightful essay upon 
 " Song Writing," from which the following extracts 
 are taken : 
 
40 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 
 
 "The songs of a nation," says Lowell, "are like 
 wild flowers pressed, as it were, by chance, between 
 the blood-stained pages of history. As if man's 
 heart had paused for a moment in its dusty march, 
 and looked back, with a flutter of the pulse and a 
 tearful smile, upon the simple peacefulness of 
 happier and purer days, gathering some wayside 
 blossom to remind it of childhood and home, 
 amid the crash of battle or the din of the 
 market. . . . 
 
 " The infinite sends its messages to us by untu- 
 tored spirits, and the lips of little children, and the 
 unboastful beauty of simple nature ; not with the 
 sound of trumpet, and the tramp of mail-clad hosts. 
 Simplicity and commonness are the proofs of 
 Beauty's divinity. Earnestly and beautifully touch- 
 ing is this eternity of simple feeling from age to 
 age, — this trustfulness with which the heart 
 flings forth to the wind its sybilline leaves to be 
 gathered and cherished as oracles forever. The 
 unwieldy current of life whirls and writhes and 
 struggles muddily onward, and there in mid-current 
 the snow-white lilies blow in unstained safety, gen- 
 eration after generation. The cloud-capt monu- 
 ments of mighty kings and captains crumble into 
 dust and mingle with the nameless ashes of those 
 who reared them ; but we know perhaps the name 
 
EARLY MANHOOD. 41 
 
 and even the color of the hair and eyes of some 
 humble shepherd's mistress who brushed through 
 the dew to meet her lover's kiss, when the rising 
 sun glittered on the golden images that crowned 
 the palace-roof of Semiramis. Fleets and navies 
 are overwhelmed and forgotten, but some tiny, 
 love-freighted argosy launched (like those of the 
 Hindoo maidens) upon the stream of time in days 
 now behind the horizon, floats down to us with its 
 frail lamp yet burning. Theories for which great 
 philosophers wore their hearts out, histories over 
 which the eyes of wise men ached for weary years, 
 creeds for which hundreds underwent an exulting 
 martyrdom, poems which had once quickened the 
 beating of the world's great heart, and the certainty 
 of whose deathlessness had made death sweet to 
 the poet, all these have smouldered to nothing, but 
 some word of love, some outvent of sorrow which 
 haply filled only one pair of eyes with tears, these 
 seem to have become a part of earth's very life- 
 blood. They live because those who wrote never 
 thought whether they would live or not. . . 
 
 " A good song is as if the poet had pressed his 
 heart against the paper, and that could have con- 
 veyed its hot, tumultuous throbbings to the reader. 
 The low, musical rustle of the wind among the 
 leaves is songlike, but the slow, unfolding of the 
 
42 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 
 
 leaves and blossoms, and under them the concep- 
 tion and ripening of the golden fruit through long 
 summer days of sunshine and of rain, are like the 
 grander, but not more beautiful or eternal, off- 
 spring of poesy. The song-writer must take his 
 place somewhere between the poet and the musi- 
 cian, and must form a distinct class by himself. 
 The faculty of writing songs is certainly a peculiar 
 one, and as perfect in its kind as that of writing 
 epics. They can only be written by the poets ; 
 like the mistletoe they are slender and delicate, 
 but they only grow on oaks. 
 
 "Songs are scarcely amenable to the common 
 law of criticism. If anything were needed to prove 
 the utter foolishness of the assertion, that that 
 only is good poetry which can be leduced to good 
 prose, we might summon as witnesses the most 
 perfect songs in our language. The best part of a 
 song lies often not at all in the words, but in the 
 metre perhaps, or the structure of the verse, in 
 the wonderful melody which arose of itself from 
 the feeling of the writer, and which unawares 
 throws the heart into the same frame of thought. 
 
 " In a good song, the words seem to have given 
 birth to the melody and the melody to the words. 
 The strain of music seems to have wandered into 
 
EARLY MANHOOD. 43 
 
 the poet's heart, and to have been the thread round 
 which his thoughts have crystallized 
 
 " We hear men often enough speak of seeing 
 God in the stars and the flowers, but they will 
 never be truly religious till they learn to behold 
 him in each other also, where he is most easily, 
 yet most rarely discovered. But to have become 
 blessed enough to find him in anything, is a sure 
 pledge of finding him in all, and many times per- 
 haps some snatch of artless melody floating over 
 the land, as if under the random tutelage of the 
 breeze, may have given the hint of its high calling 
 to many a soul which else had lain torpid and im- 
 bruted. Great principles work out their fulfill- 
 ment with the slightest and least regarded tools, 
 and destiny may chance to speak to us in the 
 smell of a buttercup or the music of the com- 
 monest air. . . . 
 
 " The true way of judging the value of any one 
 of the arts is by measuring its aptness and power 
 to advance the refinement, and sustain the natural 
 dignity of mankind. Men may show rare genius 
 in amusing or satirizing their fellow-beings, or in 
 raising their wonder, or in giving them excuses for 
 all manner of weakness by making them believe 
 that, although their nature prompts them to be 
 angels, they are truly no better than worms, — but 
 
44 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 
 
 only to him will death come as a timely guide to a 
 higher and more glorious sphere of action and duty, 
 who has done somewhat, however little, to reveal to 
 the soul its beauty and to awaken in it an aspiration 
 towards what only our degradation forces us to call 
 an ideal life. It is but a half-knowledge which 
 sneers at Utilitarianism, as if that word may not 
 have a spiritual as well as a material significance. 
 He is indeed a traitor to his better nature who would 
 persuade men that the use of anything is propor- 
 tioned to the benefit it confers upon their animal 
 part. If the spirit's hunger be not satisfied, the 
 body will not be at ease, though it slumber in 
 Sybaris and feast with Apicius. It is the soul 
 that makes men rich or poor, and he who has given 
 a nation a truer conception of beauty, which is the 
 body of truth, as love is its spirit, has done more 
 for its happiness and to secure its freedom, than 
 if he had doubled its defences or its revenue. He 
 who has taught a man to look kindly on a flower 
 or an insect, has thereby made him sensible of the 
 beauty of tenderness toward men, and rendered 
 charity and loving kindness so much the more 
 easy, and so much the more necessary to him. 
 To make life more reverend in the eyes of the 
 refined and educated, may be a noble ambition in 
 the scholar, or the poet, but to reveal to the poor 
 
EARL V MANHOOD. 45 
 
 and ignorant and degraded, those divine arms of 
 the eternal beauty which encircle them lovingly 
 by day and night, to teach them that they also are 
 children of one Father, and the nearer haply to 
 his heart for the very want and wretchedness which 
 half-persuaded them they were orphan and forgot- 
 ten, this, truly, is the task of one who is greater 
 than the poet or the scholar, namely, a true man, 
 — and this belongs to the song-writer." 
 
 In this same number of " The Pioneer " is, a 
 long notice of " Poems on Slavery," by Prof. Long- 
 fellow ; and after this lapse of more than forty years 
 it is interesting to read such prophetic criticisms 
 as the following : 
 
 " Such a man as this, so well known as a polished 
 scholar of general literature, so always welcome to 
 every fireside as a poet whose muse has never in 
 any way spotted the virgin white of her purity, 
 will find a ready hearing, when he comes as a 
 pleader on either side of a vexed question, with 
 many to whom all others would be resolutely 
 deaf. . . . 
 
 " The sentiment of anti-slavery is spreading so 
 fast and so far over the whole land, that its oppo- 
 nents are rapidly dwindling into a minority. 
 
 " There, for instance, is William Lloyd Garrison, 
 the half-inspired Luther of this reform, a man too 
 
46 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 
 
 remarkable to be appreciated in his generation, 
 but whom the future will recognize as a great and 
 wonderful spirit. There, too, is Whittier, the fiery 
 Keener of this spiritual warfare, who, Scaevola- 
 like has sacrificed on the altar of duty, that right 
 hand which might have made him acknowledged 
 as the most passionate lyrist of his time. There 
 is the tenderly-loving Maria Child, the author of 
 that dear book ' Philothea,' a woman of genius, 
 who lives with humble content in the intellectual 
 Coventry to which her conscientiousness has ban- 
 ished her — a fate the hardest for genius to bear. 
 Nor ought the gentle spirit of Follen, a lion with 
 a lamb's heart, to be forgotten, whose fiery fate, 
 from which the mind turns horror-stricken, was 
 perhaps to his mild nature less dreadful than that 
 stake and fagot of public opinion, in dragging him 
 to which many whom he loved were not inactive, 
 for silence in such times is action. And Channing, 
 a man great and original in perceiving, elucidating 
 and defending those moral truths which others 
 were the first to discover." 
 
 The anti-slavery movement had already begun 
 to enlist the warmest sympathies of young Lowell's 
 earnest, upright nature. He did not, however, de- 
 sire extreme measures, but hoped that slavery might 
 be abolished in a legal, rational way. There was 
 
EARLY MANHOOD. 
 
 47 
 
 also another strong influence at this time that was 
 helping to mould the poet's character. I refer to 
 the doctrines of the Transcendentalists that were 
 throwing a new and more spiritual light upon cur- 
 rent thought and literature. 
 
 " To be young," writes Lowell, " is surely the 
 best, if the most precarious, gift of life ; yet there 
 are some of us who would hardly consent to be 
 young again, if it were at the cost of our recollec- 
 tion of Mr. Emerson's first lectures during the 
 consulate of Van Buren. We used to walk in 
 from the country to the Masonic Temple (I think 
 it was), through the crisp winter night, and listen 
 to that thrilling voice of his, so charged with subtle 
 meaning and subtle music, as shipwrecked men 
 on a raft to the hail of a ship that came with un- 
 hoped-for food and rescue. Cynics might say what 
 they liked. Did our imaginations transfigure dry 
 remainder-biscuit into ambrosia .' At anyrate, he 
 brought us life, which, on the whole, is no bad 
 thing. Was it all transcendentalism .'' magic-lan- 
 tern pictures on mist .-' As you will. Those then 
 were just what we wanted. But it was not so. 
 The delight and the benefit were that he put us 
 in communication with a larger style of thought, 
 sharpened our wits with more pungent phrase, 
 gave us ravishing glimpses of an ideal under the 
 
48 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 
 
 dry husk of our New England : made us conscious 
 of the supreme and everlasting originality of what- 
 ever bit of soul might be in any of us ; freed us, in 
 short, from the stocks of prose in which we had 
 sat so long that we had grown well-nigh contented 
 in our cramps. And who that saw the audience 
 will ever forget it, where every one still capable 
 of fire, or longing to renew in them the half-for- 
 gotten sense of it, was gathered ? Those faces, 
 young and old, agleam with pale intellectual light, 
 eager with pleased attention, flash upon me once 
 more from the deep recesses of the years with an 
 exquisite pathos. Ah, beautiful young eyes, brim- 
 ming with love and hope, wholly banished now 
 in that other world we call the Past, or peering 
 doubtfully through the pensive gloaming of memory, 
 your light impoverishes these cheaper days. I hear 
 again that rustle of sensation, as they turned to 
 exchange glances over some pithier thought, some 
 keener flash of that humor which always played 
 about the horizon of his mind like heat-lightning, 
 and it seems now like the sad whisper of the autumn 
 leaves that are whirling around me. 
 
 " To some of us that long-past experience remains 
 as the most marvellous and fruitful we have ever 
 had. Emerson awakened us, saved us from the 
 
EARLY MANHOOD. 45 
 
 body of this death. It is the sound of the trumpet 
 that the young soul longs for, careless what breath 
 may fill it. Sidney heard it, in the ballad of 
 ' Chevy Chase,' and we in Emerson. Nor did it 
 blow retreat, but called to us with assurance of 
 victory. Did they say he was disconnected .' So 
 were the stars, that seemed larger to our eyes, still 
 keen with that excitement, as we walked homeward 
 with prouder stride over the creaking snow. And 
 were they not knit together by a higher logic than 
 our mere sense could master.? Were we enthu- 
 siasts .' I hope and believe we were, and am thank- 
 ful to the man who made us worth something for 
 once in our lives. If asked what was left } what 
 we carried home .'' we should not have been careful 
 for an answer. It would have been enough if we 
 had said that something beautiful had passed that 
 way." 
 
 Says an appreciative friend of the poet and re- 
 former": 
 
 " We often forget that it is now nearly half a 
 century that Mr. Lowell has been in society, or on 
 the larger stage of events, a conspicuous figure in 
 our public hfe. His wonderful freshness and vari- 
 ety of talent have so accustomed us to think of him 
 as a young man, that we do not yield readily to the 
 reminder when we are called upon to remember 
 
50 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 
 
 that Mr. Lowell won his spurs as a Radical forty 
 years ago. It is that many years since he pro- 
 tested against the mob belief that ' President Polk 
 is our country,' when the battle flags of the Mex- 
 ican war were unfurled. 
 
 "Almost before the present active generation be- 
 gan to live, Mr. Lowell was one of those young and 
 generous spirits who were not afraid to step out of 
 society to the side of the slave. We have lived so 
 far beyond that time that we can hardly appreciate 
 the courage involved in the act. But forty years 
 ago society looked upon young men like Edmund 
 Quincy, James Russell Lowell and Wendell Phil- 
 lips as taking themselves outside of its protection 
 when they put on the badge of abolition. Look- 
 ing about us to-day, reading in the papers of the 
 promotion of colored soldiers in the United States 
 Army, it sdems impossible to believe that even in 
 Boston there were men who openly expressed dis- 
 gust at the spectacle of ' gentlemen ' like Quincy, 
 Lowell and Phillips associating themselves with the 
 insulting visionaries who said that the black man 
 ought to have a chance to be the equal of the white 
 man, that slavery was an abomination, and that 
 American liberty was a humbug so long as the 
 black man remained a slave upon our soil. It was 
 all very well, society said, for the humbly-bora 
 
EARLY MANHOOD. 
 
 SI 
 
 Garrison, the Quaker Whittier, or the poUtician 
 Sumner to agitate ; it seemed logical that they 
 should agitate ; but why should men for whom 
 wood was hewn and water borne, men trained to 
 elegant letters, take up their levelling doctrines ? 
 Society was grieved, it was disgusted ; it must sol- 
 emnly warn them that if they interfered with trade 
 and its prospective profits, they must be prepared 
 to incur an even more severe penalty than its frown. 
 "The Church shut its doors in the face of free- 
 dom. Edmund Quincy was compelled to hold some 
 of his abolition meetings out of doors ; for when 
 public halls were closed against him, no congrega- 
 tion that desired to grow dared open its church to 
 him, dared contemplate the consequences attendant 
 on abolition preached from its pulpit. Society's 
 frown may have saddened the gentle and humanity- 
 loving Quincy. He grieved for society, not for 
 himself. It called up the fighting fire in Lowell 
 and Phillips, and the indignant poet never rose to 
 higher strains than when he sang the sure though 
 delayed triumph of justice, or smote the cowardice 
 that dared not be right with two or three, when he 
 told the world that the scaffold swayed the future, 
 and in a thousand ways showed his manly intoler- 
 ance of sham, however robed in most respectable 
 precedents. 
 
52 JAMES JiUSSELL LOWELL. 
 
 One cannot but apply to Mr. Lowell the words 
 in which he addressed Quincy : 
 
 " His soul would not conspire 
 With selfish men to soothe the mob's desire, 
 Veiling with garlands Moloch's bloody stone ; 
 The high-bred instincts of a better day 
 Ruled in his blood." 
 
CHAPTER V. 
 
 MARRIAGE AND EARLY PUBLICATIONS. 
 
 ON the twenty-sixth of December, 1844, Lowell 
 was married to Miss Maria White of Water- 
 town, to whom many of his most beautiful songs 
 and sonnets had already been inscribed. " Irene" 
 and " My Love " give one a vivid pen-picture of 
 the lovely, saintly spirit that inspired the pen of 
 the young poet, and what love poem could be more 
 exquisitely expressed than the following : 
 
 " Mary, since first I knew thee, to this hour 
 My love hath deepened v/ith my wiser sense, 
 0£ what in Woman is to reverence ; 
 Thy clear heart, fresh as e'er was forest flower. 
 Still opens more to me its beauteous dower ; — 
 But let praise hush, — Love asks no evidence 
 To prove itself well placed ; we know not whence 
 It gleans" the straws that thatch its humble bower: 
 We can but say we found it in the heart, 
 Spring of all sweetest thoughts, arch foe of blame, 
 Sower of flowers in the dusty mart, 
 Pure vestal of the poet's holy flame, — 
 This is enough, and we have done our part 
 If we but keep it spotless as it came." 
 S3 
 
54 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 
 
 It is hard to make a selection from so many of the 
 beautiful poems inspired at this time by the new 
 joy that had entered into the poet's life, but the 
 following sonnet shows how truly he recognized 
 the source of this fresh inspiration : 
 
 " What were I, Love, if I were stripped of thee. 
 If thine eyes shut me out whereby I live, 
 Thou, who unto my calmer soul dost give 
 Knowledge, and Truth, and holy Mystery, 
 Wherein Truth mainly lies for those who see 
 Beyond the earthly and the fugitive, 
 Who in the grandeur of the soul believe, 
 And only in the Infinite are free ? 
 Without thee I were naked, bleak, and bare 
 As yon dead cedar on the sea-cliff's brow j 
 And Nature's teachings, which come to me now 
 Common and beautiful as light and air. 
 Would be as fruitless as a stream which still 
 Slips through the wheel of some old ruined mill." 
 
 To have known and loved a noble, beautiful 
 woman like Maria White Lowell was in itself 
 "a liberal education," and those happy years of 
 wedded life in the peaceful home at Elmwood 
 seemed ideally perfect. The old halls began to 
 ring with the music of children's voices, but the 
 shadow of the dread Death Angel was hover- 
 ing near. Little Blanche to whose " ever fresh and 
 happy memory " the second volume of " Poems " is 
 
MARRIAGE AND EARLY PUBLICATIONS. 
 
 SS 
 
 "reverently dedicated," was soon to leave them 
 for the " upper fold " ; and most tenderly does the 
 stricken mother strive to comfort another break- 
 ing heart when she writes : 
 
 " After our child's untroubled breath 
 
 Up to the Father took its way, 
 And on our home the shade of Death 
 
 Like a long twilight haunting lay, 
 
 And friends came round, with us to weep 
 
 Her little spirit's swift remove. 
 The story of the Alpine sheep 
 
 Was told to us by one we love. 
 
 They in the valley's sheltering care 
 Soon crop the meadow's tender prime, 
 
 And when the sod grows brown and bare. 
 The shepherd strives to make them climb 
 
 To airy shelves of pasture green. 
 That hang along the mountain's side. 
 
 Where grass and flowers together lean 
 And down through mist the sunbeams slide. 
 
 But nought can tempt the timid things 
 
 The steep and rugged paths to try. 
 Though sweet the shepherd calls and sings, 
 
 And seared below the pastures lie. 
 
 Till in his arms their lambs he takes. 
 
 Along the dizzy verge to go ; 
 Then, heedless of the rifts and breaks, 
 
 They follow on o'er rock and snow. 
 
56 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 
 
 And in those pastures, lifted fair, 
 
 More dewy-soft than lowland mead. 
 The shepherd drops his tender care 
 
 And sheep and lambs together feed. 
 
 This parable, by Nature breathed, 
 
 Blew on me as the south wind free 
 O'er frozen brooks, that flow unsheathed 
 
 From icy thraldom to the sea. 
 
 A blissful vision, through the night. 
 
 Would all my happy senses sway, 
 Of the good Shepherd on the height, 
 
 Or climbing up the starry way, 
 
 Holding our little lamb asleep, — 
 
 While, like the murmur of the sea. 
 Sounded that voice along the deep. 
 
 Saying, ' Arise and follow me ! ' " 
 
 All the flock, save little Mabel, were taken to 
 " those heavenly pastures, lifted fair " ; and a sub- 
 dued strain — a pathetic minor chord — runs now 
 through the poet's verse : — 
 
 " I thought our love at full, but I did err ; 
 
 Joy's wreath drooped o'er mine eyes ; I could not see 
 
 That sorrow in our happy world must be 
 
 Love's deepest spokesman and interpreter." 
 
 Of the poems written at this time, " The Change- 
 ling," " She came and went," " After the Burial," 
 and " The First Snow-Fall " have come like a bene- 
 diction to many sorrowing hearts. From the latter 
 we cannot refrain quoting a few stanzas : — 
 
MARRIAGE AND EARLY PUBLICATIONS. 57 
 
 " I stood and watched by the window 
 
 The noiseless work of the sky, 
 And the sudden flurries of snow-birds 
 
 Lilce brown leaves whirling by. 
 
 I thought of a mound in sweet Auburn 
 
 Where a little headstone stood ; 
 How the flakes were folding it gently 
 
 As did robins the babes in the wood. 
 
 Up spoke our own little Mabel, 
 
 Saying, ' Father, who makes it snow ? ' 
 
 And I told of the good All-father 
 Who cares for us here below. 
 
 Again I looked at the snow-fall, 
 
 And thought of the leaden sky 
 That arched o'er our first great sorrow. 
 
 When that mound was heaped so high. 
 
 I remembered the gradual patience 
 That fell from that cloud like snow. 
 
 Flake by flake, healing and hiding 
 The scar of our deep-plunged woe. 
 
 And again to the child I whispered, 
 
 ' The snow that husheth all, 
 Dating, the merciful Father 
 
 Alone can make it fall ! ' _ 
 
 Then, with eyes that saw not, I kissed her; 
 
 And she, kissing back, could not know 
 That my kiss was given to her sister 
 
 Folded close under deepening snow.'' 
 
 Writes Longfellow in his diary of May 29, 1846 : 
 " Called to see Lowell this morning ; and climbed 
 
gS JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 
 
 to his celestial study, with its pleasant- prospects 
 through the small square windows, and its ceiling 
 so low you can touch it with your hand. Read 
 Donne's poems, while he went down to feed his 
 hens and chickens. . . . We then discoursed 
 upon Abolitionists for half an hour. He is very 
 ardent on this topic." 
 
 On June 8, of the same year, Longfellow adds : 
 " Got back at tea time and found Lowell waiting. 
 He says his heart sinks within him at the times 
 being so out of joint." 
 
 And again a month later, he adds : 
 
 " Sumner passed last night with us and is to 
 stay till Monday. ... At noon we walked to 
 Lowell's. He had gone to the anti-slavery picnic 
 in Dedham. But we saw his gentle wife, who, I 
 fear, is not long of this world. Speaking of the 
 Abolitionists, she said, 'They do not modulate 
 their words and voices. They are like people who 
 live with the deaf, or hear water-falis, and whose 
 voices become high and harsh.' " 
 
 Referring to the warm friendship between Long- 
 fellow and her husband, Mrs. Lowell once wrote : 
 
 " I have never seen such a beautiful friendship 
 between men of such distinct personalities, though 
 closely linked together by mutual tastes and affec- 
 tions. They criticise and praise each other's per- 
 
MARRIAGE AND EARLY PUBLICATIONS jg 
 
 formances with a frankness not to be surpassed, 
 and seem to have attained that happy height of 
 faith where no misunderstanding, no jealousy, no 
 reserve, exists." 
 
 On the twenty-second of December, 1 847, Long- 
 fellow notes the publication of Lowell's new vol- 
 ume of Poems, and spends the evening of the 
 twenty-fourth in reading them. "Some of them," 
 he says, "are very striking, often soaring into the 
 sublime ; for example, ' To the Past,' ' On the 
 Present Crisis,' and ' Extreme Unction.' " 
 
 The presentation copy of this volume to Charles 
 Sumner is in the Sumner Collection at the Harvard 
 College Library — "with the author's cordial es- 
 teem, Xmas, 1 847." It contains thirty-eight poems, 
 including " Anti-Texas, " " On the Capture of 
 Certain Fugitive Slaves near Washington," and 
 other anti-slavery stanzas which won great pop- 
 ularity among the Abolitionists. 
 
 March 22, 1848, Longfellow writes: "Lowell 
 passed the evening with us. He has half-finished 
 his Fable for Critics. He says he never means to 
 write any more poetry — at least for many years ; 
 he 'cannot write slowly enough.' " 
 
 And it would indeed seem as if the poet scarcely 
 knew how to shake off the spirit of rhyme that 
 had taken possession of him. Title page, preface. 
 
6o JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 
 
 and even the long "preliminary note" to this 
 " Fable for Critics " are all in rhyming measure, 
 though clothed in prose, and the whole little book 
 is "as full of puns," as Underwood expresses it, 
 "as a pudding of plums." 
 
 I have a copy of the first " anonymous " edition 
 — which is now quite rare — " set forth in Octo- 
 ber, the twenty-first day, in the year '48; G. P. 
 Putnam, Broadway." 
 
 The modest, drab-colored little book looks as 
 demure as a Quakeress among its gilt-edged com- 
 panions, but the brilliant sparkle of wit that flashes 
 forth from every page at once transfigures the 
 plain "anonymous" face with the unmistakable 
 stamp of genius. The author preludes : 
 
 " Having scrawled at full galop (as far as that 
 goes) in a style that is neither good verse nor bad 
 prose, and being a person that nobody knows, 
 some people will say I am rather more free with 
 my readers than it is becoming to be, that I 
 seem to expect them to wait on my leisure in fol- 
 lowing wherever I wander at pleasure, that, in 
 short, I take more than a young author's lawful 
 ease, and laugh in a queer way so like Mephis- 
 topheles, that the public will doubt, as they grope 
 through my rhythm, if in truth I am making fun 
 at them or with them." 
 
MARRIAGE AND EARLY PUBLICATIONS 6i 
 
 The Fable has, in truth, a " sting in its tail," 
 but all the criticisms are so good-naturedly humor- 
 ous, that only a weak mind could take offence at 
 the ha,ppyjeu d' esprit — as the writer himself says 
 " none but an owl would feel sore at a rub from a 
 jester who tells you, without any subterfuge, that 
 he sits in Diogenes' tub." 
 
 It is especially interesting to read the poet's 
 criticism upon himself : 
 
 " There is Lowell, who's striving Parnassus to climb 
 
 With a whole bale of isms tied together with rhyme, 
 
 He might get on alone, spite of brambles and boulders. 
 
 But he can't with that bundle he has on his shoulders, 
 
 The top of the hill he will ne'er come nigh reaching 
 
 Till he learns the distinction 'twixt singing and preaching; 
 
 His lyre has some chords that would ring pretty well, 
 
 But he'd rather by half make a drum of the shell, 
 
 And rattle away till he's old as Methusalem, 
 
 At the head of a march to the last new Jerusalem." 
 
 When he comes to speak of Longfellow, the 
 critic's " steel becomes a swan's quill " : 
 
 " Who — but hey-day I What's this .' Messieurs Matfliews and 
 
 Poe 
 You mustn't fling mud-balls at Longfellow so, 
 Does it make a man worse that his. character's such 
 As to make his friends love him (as you think) too much ? 
 Why, there is not a bard at this moment alive 
 More willing than he that his fellows should thrive ; 
 While you are abusing him thus, even now 
 
62 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 
 
 He would help either one of you out of a slough ; 
 
 You may say that he's smooth and all that till you're hoarse, 
 
 But remember that elegance also is force ; 
 
 After polishing granite as much as you will, 
 
 The heart keeps its tough old persistency still ; 
 
 Deduct all you can that still keeps you at bay, — 
 
 Why, he'll live till men weary of Collins and Gray; 
 
 I'm not over-fond of Greek metres in English, 
 
 To me rhyme's a gain, so it be not too jinglish, 
 
 And your modern hexameter verses are no more 
 
 Like Greek ones than sleek Mr. Pope is like Homer ; 
 
 As the roar of the sea to the coo of a pigeon is, 
 
 So, compared to your moderns, sounds old Melesigenes ; 
 
 I may be too partial, the reason, perhaps, o't is 
 
 That I've heard the old blind man recite his own rhapsodies. 
 
 And my ear with that music inpregnate may be. 
 
 Like the poor exiled shell with the soul of the sea, 
 
 Or, as one can't bear Strauss when his nature is cloven 
 
 To its deeps within deeps by the stroke of Beethoven ; 
 
 But, set that aside, and 'tis truth that I speak. 
 
 Had Theocritus written in English, not Greek, 
 
 I believe that his exquisite sense would scarce change a line 
 
 In that rare, tender, virgin-like pastoral Evangeline. 
 
 That's not ancient nor modern, its place is apart 
 
 Where time has no sway, in the realm of pure Art, 
 
 'Tis a shrine of retreat from Earth's hubbub and strife 
 
 As quiet and chaste as the author's own life." 
 
 On November lo of that same year, [1848], 
 Longfellow writes : 
 
 "Lowell passed the evening with us. His 
 ' Fable for Critics ' is thought by all to be very 
 
MARRIAGE AND EARLY PUBLICATIONS. 63 
 
 witty. His Biglow poems will soon be out, and 
 also a Christmas poem ; making three books this 
 autumn." 
 
 The Christmas Poem to which Longfellow refers 
 is doubtless "The Vision of Sir Launfal," which 
 was written in about forty-eight hours — during 
 which time the poet scarcely ate or slept. It 
 seems throughout like an inspired poem — a won- 
 derful improvisation — as prefigured by the open- 
 ing stanzas : 
 
 " Over his keys the musing organist, 
 
 Beginning doubtfully and far away, 
 First lets his fingers wander as they list. 
 
 And builds a bridge from Dreamland for his lay : 
 Then, as the touch of his loved instrument 
 
 Gives hope and fervor, nearer draws his theme, - 
 First guessed by faint auroral flashes sent 
 
 Along the wavering vista of his dream." 
 
 I doubt if there is another poem in our language 
 so dear to the popular heart as this. How the musi- 
 cal words and majestic thoughts weave themselves 
 together ! — 
 
 " Whether we look or whether we listen 
 We hear life murmur, or see it glisten ; 
 Every clod feels a stir of might, 
 
 An instinct within it that reaches and towers, 
 And, groping blindly above it for light. 
 
 Climbs to a soul in grass and flowers.'' 
 
64 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 
 
 The contrasted pictures of summer and winter 
 that form the preludes to the two parts of the 
 poem, are inimitable in their magic word painting ; 
 and the high moral purpose of the exquisite allegory- 
 shows the true and enduring source of Lowell's 
 poetical inspiration, the deep religious instinct 
 united to a fervent sincere love for humanity that 
 runs like a silver thread through all his writings : 
 
 " The voice that was calmer than silence said, 
 ' feo it is I, be not afraid. 
 In many climes, without avail. 
 Thou hast spent thy life for the Holy Grail ; 
 Behold it is here, — this cup which thou 
 Didst fill at the streamlet for me but now ; 
 This crust is my body broken for thee. 
 This water His blood that died on the tree; 
 The Holy Supper is kept, indeed ; 
 In whatso we share with another's need ; 
 Not what we give but what we share, — 
 For the gift without the giver is bare ; 
 Who gives himself with his alms feeds three, ^ 
 Himself, his hungering neighbor, and me." 
 
 Says an appreciative critic on the other side of 
 the water : — 
 
 " There is one clear note running through the 
 whole of Lowell's utterances which makes them 
 fresh as with the sea air. It is the note of moral 
 supremacy; ' that moral supremacy is the only one 
 
MARRIAGE AND EARLY PUBLICATIONS. 65 
 
 that leaves monuments and not ruins behind it' — 
 that ' great mottoes of the race are moral not intel- 
 lectual, and their force lies ready to the use of the 
 poorest and weakest of us all ; that ' no man without 
 intense faith in something can ever be in earnest ' 
 — that ' in act, a right ambition is to be a man 
 amongst men, not a humbug amongst humbugs — 
 and in word ' to give the true coin of speech, never 
 the highly ornamental promise to pay — token of 
 insolvency,' " 
 
CHAPTER VI. 
 
 THE BIGLOW PAPERS. FIRST SERIES. 
 
 IT was in the summer of 1846, when the Mex- 
 ican War was agitating our country, that a 
 letter appeared in the " Boston Courier," purport- 
 ing to come from a certain Ezekial Biglow, and 
 enclosing a poem in the Yankee dialect, written 
 by his son Hosea. When Charles Sumner saw 
 this first " Biglow " poem, he exclaimed to a friend, 
 "This Yankee poet has the true spirit. He puts 
 the case admirably. I wish, however, he could 
 have used good English ! " 
 
 The abolitionists rightly feared that the war was 
 waged to obtain new territory for the extension 
 of slavery, and Hosea with outspoken frankness 
 declares : 
 
 " Ez fer war, I call it murder, — 
 
 There you hev it plain and flat; 
 I don't want to go no furder 
 
 Than my Testyment fer that. 
 
 " Wut's the use o' meetin'-goin' 
 
 Every Sabbath, wet or dry, 
 Ef it's right to go a-mowin' 
 66 
 
THE BIGLOW PAPERS. — FIRST SERIES. 
 
 Feller-men like oats and rye ? 
 I dunno but wut it's pooty 
 
 Trainin' round in bobtail coats, — 
 But it's cur'us Christian dooty 
 
 This ere cuttin' folks's throats. 
 
 " They may talk o' Freedom's airy 
 
 Till they're pupple in the face, — 
 It's a grand gret cemetery 
 
 Fer the barthrights of our race ; 
 They jest want this Californy 
 
 So's to lug new slave-states in 
 To abuse ye an' to scorn ye, 
 
 An' to plunder ye like sin. 
 
 " Clang the bells in every steeple. 
 
 Call all true men to disown 
 The tradoocers of our people. 
 
 The enslavers o' their own ; 
 Let our dear old Bay State proudly 
 
 Put the trumpet to her mouth, 
 Let her ring this messidge loudly 
 
 In the ears of all the South : — 
 
 "I'll return ye good for evil 
 
 Much ez we frail mortils can. 
 But I wun't go help the Devil 
 
 Makin' man the cus o' man ; 
 Call me coward, call me traitor. 
 
 Jest as suits your mean idees, — 
 Here I stand a tyrant-hater. 
 
 An' the friend o' God an' Peace I " 
 
 67 
 
68 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 
 
 Hosea's poems, each furnished with preface and 
 notes by an imaginary Parson Wilbur, now became 
 a regular feature of the "Courier," and the reading 
 public were delighted and mystified at once, by 
 this unique politician whose homely dialect and 
 jingling rhymes concealed so much keen wit and 
 biting sarcasm. A Mexican war recruit, " Birdof- 
 fredom Sawin," gives his experience in " sogering " 
 which — 
 
 " ain't a mite like our October trainin, ' 
 
 A chap could clear right out from there eft only looked like rainin'. 
 
 This sort o' thing ain't /«/ like thet, — I wish thet I wuz furder, — 
 Ninepunce a day fur killin' folks comes kind o' low fer murder." — 
 
 " Wal, it beats all how big I felt hoorawing in ole Funnel 
 Wen Mister Bolles he gin the sword to our Leftenant Cunnle 
 (It's Mister Secondary Bolles, thet writ the prize peace essay ; 
 That's why he didn't 'list himself along o' us I dessay) ; 
 An' Rantoul, tu, talked pooty loud, but don't put his foot in it 
 Coz human life's so sacred thet he's principled ag'in it, — 
 Though I myself can't rightly see it's any wus achokin' on 'em, 
 Than puttin' bullets thru their lights, or with a baynet pokin' on 'em. 
 IIow dreffle slick he reeled it off (like Blitz at our lyceum 
 Ahauling ribbins from his chops so quick you skeercely see 'em) 
 About the Anglo-Saxon race (an' saxons would be handy 
 To du the buryin' down here upon the Rio Grandy), 
 
THE BIGLOW PAPERS.— FIRST SERIES. Q^ 
 
 About our patriotic pas an' our star-spangled banner 
 Our country's bird a-lookin' on an' singin' out hosanner, 
 An' how he (Mister B. himself) wuz happy fer Ameriky, — 
 I felt, as Sister Patience sez, a leetle mite hystericky." 
 
 And SO the rollicking rhyme runs on with nu- 
 merous " hits " upon the politicians of the day, 
 and a layer of sound common sense and strong 
 moral purpose beneath all the bright flashes of 
 wit. "What Mr. Robinson Thinks" came next, 
 and caught the public ear immediately, much to 
 the annoyance of Mr. Robinson himself, who, 
 although on the wrong side of a great moral ques- 
 tion, was a quiet, refined man of much culture and 
 ability. Even the children in the streets caught 
 the ludicrous refrain, — 
 
 " John p. 
 
 Robinson he 
 
 Sez he wunt vote fer Guvener B." 
 
 and to escape the sound of his own name it is 
 
 said that he finally went abroad. He had scarcely 
 
 landed at Liverpool, however, before he heard a 
 
 child's voice singing the same odious words, and 
 
 even upon the shores of the Mediterranean his 
 
 ears were again accosted with, — 
 
 "John P. 
 
 Robinson he 
 
 Sez they didn't know everythin' down in Judee ! " 
 
70 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 
 
 At the same time that this poem appears in the 
 " Boston Courier " the imaginary Parson Wilbur 
 writes as follows to Mr. Buckingham, the editor : 
 
 J4ALEM, N<rv. 4, 1847. 
 Respected Sir: 
 
 Calling at the post-office this morning, our worthy and efficient 
 post-master offered for my perusal a paragraph in the " Boston 
 Morning Post," of the third instant, wherein certain effusions of 
 the pastoral muse are attributed to the pen of Mr. James Russell 
 Lowell. 
 
 For aught I know or can affirm to the contrary, this Mr. Lowell 
 may be a very deserving person and a youth of parts (though I 
 have seen verses of his which I could never rightly understand) ; 
 and if he be such, he, I am certain, as well as I, would be free 
 from any proclivity to appropriate to himself whatever of credit 
 (or discredit) may honestly belong to another. I am confident, 
 that, in penning these few lines, I am only forestalling a disclaimer 
 from that young gentleman, whose silence hitherto, when rumor 
 pointed to himward, has excited in my bosom mingled emotions 
 of sorrow and surprise. Well may my young parishioner, Mr. 
 Biglow, exclaim with the poet, ' Sic vos non vohis' etc. ; though, in 
 saying this, I would not convey the impression that he is a pro- 
 ficient in the Latin tongue, — the tongue, I might add, of a Horace 
 and a Tally. 
 
 Mr. B. does not employ his pen, I can safely say, for any lucre 
 of worldly gain, or to be exalted by the carnal plaudits of men, 
 digito monstrari, etc. He does not wait upon Providence for mer- 
 cies, and in his heart mean merces. But I should esteem myself 
 as verily deficient in my duty (who am his friend and in some un- 
 worthy sort his spiritual Fidus Achates, etc. ) if I did not step forward 
 to claim for him whatever measure of applause might be assigned 
 to him by the judicious. 
 
THE BIGLOW PAPERS.— FIRST SERIES. 
 
 71 
 
 From this it appears that Hosea's Muse was 
 not wholly unrecognized by the keen-scented pub- 
 lic, but for various reasons Lowell preferred to 
 remain "incognito," as far as possible, and Hosea 
 again makes his appearance in a burlesque version 
 of a political speech, beginning : 
 
 " No ? Hez he ? He hain't, though ! Wut ? voted ag'in him ? 
 
 Ef the bird of our country could ketch him, she'd skin him ; 
 
 It seems though I see her, with wrath in each quill, 
 
 Like a chancery lawyer, afilin' her bill. 
 
 An' grindin' her talents ez sharp ez all nater. 
 
 To pounce like a writ on the back of the traitor. 
 
 Forgive me, my friends, ef I seem to be het, 
 
 But a crisis like this must with vigor be met; 
 
 Wen an Arnold the star-spangled banner bestains 
 
 Holl Fourth o' Julys seem to bile in my veins." 
 
 The occasion for this patriotic outburst was the 
 refusal of Dr. Palfrey the historian (then a mem- 
 ber of Congress) to vote for Mr. Winthrop, the 
 Whig candidate for speaker, and where will you 
 find more spicy irony than in the following lines : — 
 
 "An", ez fer this Palfrey, we thought wen we'd gut him in 
 He'd go kindly in wutever harness we put him in ; 
 Supposin' we did know thet he wuz a peace man ? 
 Doos he think he can be Uncle Sammle's policeman. 
 An' wen .Sam gets tipsy an' kicks up a riot. 
 Lead him off to the lockup to snooze till he's quiet ? 
 
72 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 
 
 My, the war is a war thet true paytriots can bear, ef 
 It leads to the fat promised land of a tayriff ; 
 We don't go an' fight it, nor ain't to be driv on, 
 Nor JJemmercrats nuther, thet hev wut to live on ; 
 E£ it ain't jest the thing thet's well pleasin' to God, 
 It makes us thought highly on elsewhere abroad ; 
 The Rooshian black eagle looks blue in his eerie 
 An' shakes both his heads when he hears of Monteery." 
 
 And SO the witty poem runs on for two hun- 
 dred lines or more. To this effusion of Hosea's 
 genius the parson appends a vokiminous note from 
 which we cannot resist quoting the following wise 
 remarks : — 
 
 " In reading Congressional debates, I have fan- 
 cied that after the subsidence of those painful 
 buzzings in the brain which result from such ex- 
 ercises, I detected a slender residuum of valuable 
 information. I made the discovery that nothing 
 takes longer in the saying than anything else, for 
 as ex nihilo nihil fit, so from one polypus tiothiug 
 any number of similar ones may be produced. I 
 would recommend to the attention of viva voce 
 debaters and controversialists the admirable exam- 
 ple of the monk Copres, who, in the fourth cent- 
 ury, stood for half an hour in the midst of a great 
 fire, and thereby silenced a Manichean antago- 
 nist who had less of the salamander in him. As 
 for those who quarrel in print, I have no concern 
 
THE BIG LOW PAPERS.— FIRST SERIES. 
 
 73 
 
 with them here, since the eyelids are a divinely 
 granted shield against all such. Moreover, I have 
 observed in many modern books that the printed 
 portion is becoming gradually smaller, and the 
 number of blank or fly leaves (as they are called) 
 greater. Should this fortunate tendency of litera- 
 ture continue, books will grow more valuable from 
 year to year, and the whole Serbonian bog yield to 
 the advances of firm arable land." 
 
 Hosea's next production is "A Debate in the 
 Sennit, sot to a Nusry Rhyme," which the parson 
 introduces as follows : 
 
 " Mr. Calhoun, who is made the chief speaker in 
 this burlesque, seems to think that the light of the 
 nineteenth century is to be put out as soon as he 
 tinkles his little cow-bell curfew. Whenever slav- 
 ery is touched, he sets up his scarecrow of dissolv- 
 ing the Union. This may do for the North, but I 
 should conjecture that something more than a 
 pumpkin-lantern is required to scare manifest and 
 irretrievable Destiny out of her path. Mr. Calhoun 
 cannot let go the apron-string of the Past. 
 
 " It will not do- for us to hide our faces in her 
 lap, whenever the strange Future holds out her 
 arms and asks us to come to her." 
 
 As Hosea puts it, in one of his stanzas : — 
 
74 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 
 
 « " ' The slavery question ain't no ways bewilderin.' 
 
 North and South hev one int'rest, it's plain to a glance ; 
 No'thern men, like us patriarchs, don't sell their childrin. 
 But they du sell themselves, ef they git a good chance,' 
 Sez John C. Calhoun, sez he ; — 
 
 Sez Atherton here, 
 ' This is gittin' severe, 
 I wish I could dive like a loon,' sez he." 
 
 "The Pious Editor's Creed" is prefaced by cer- 
 tain delightful extracts from one of Parson Wil- 
 bur's sermons. "See," he says, "what a pulpit 
 the editor mounts daily, sometimes with a congre- 
 gation of fifty thousand within reach of his voice, 
 and never so much as a nodder, even, among them ! 
 And from what a Bible can he choose his text — 
 a Bible which needs no translation, and which 
 no priestcraft can shut and clasp from laity — the 
 open volume of the world, upon which, with a pen 
 of sunshine or destroying fire, the inspired Present 
 is even now writing the annals of God! Methinks 
 the editor who should understand his calling, and 
 be equal thereto, would truly deserve that title 
 which Homer bestows upon princes. He would 
 be the Moses of our nineteenth century ; and 
 whereas the old Sinai, silent now, is but a common 
 mountain stared at by the elegant tourist, and 
 crawled over by the hammering geologist, he must 
 find his tables of the new law here among factories 
 
THE BIGLOW PAPERS. — FIRST SERIES. 75 
 
 and cities in this Wilderness of Sin (Numbers 
 xxxiii. 12) called Progress of Civilization, and be 
 the captain of our Exodus into the Canaan of a 
 truer social order. . . Wonderful to him that 
 sees it rightly, is the newspaper. . . . Hither, 
 to my obscure corner, by wind or steam, on horse- 
 back or dromedary-back, in the pouch of the Indian 
 runner, or clicking over the magnetic wires, troop 
 all the famous performers from the four quarters 
 of the globe. Looked at from a point of criti- 
 cism, tiny puppets they seem all, as the editor sets 
 up his booth upon my desk and officiates as show- 
 man. . . . Think of it ; for three dollars a year 
 I buy a season to this great Globe Theatre, for 
 which God would write the dramas (only that we 
 like farces, spectacles, and the tragedies of Apollyon 
 better), whose scene-shifter is Time, and whose 
 curtain is rung down by Death. 
 
 " Such thoughts will occur to me sometimes as 
 I am tearing off the wrapper of my newspaper. 
 Then suddenly that otherwise too often vacant sheet 
 becomes invested for me with a strange kind of awe. 
 Look ! deaths and marriages, notices of inventions, 
 discoveries, and books, lists of promotions, of killed, 
 wounded, and missing, news of fires, accidents, of 
 sudden wealth and as sudden poverty ; — I hold in 
 my hand the ends of myriad invisible electric con- 
 
76 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 
 
 ductors, along which tremble the joys, sorrows, 
 wrongs, triumphs, hopes, and despairs of as many- 
 men and women everywhere. So that upon that 
 mood of mind which seems to isolate me from man- 
 kind as a spectator of their puppet-pranks, another 
 supervenes, in which I feel that I, too, unknown and 
 unheard of, am yet of some import to my fellows. 
 For through my newspaper here, do not families 
 take pains to send me, an entire stranger, news of 
 a death among them .' Are not here two who 
 would have me know of their marriage .-' And, 
 strangest of all, is not this singular person anxious 
 to have me informed that he has received a fresh 
 supply of Dimitry Bruisgins .? But to none of us 
 does the Present continue miraculous (even if for 
 a moment discerned as such). We glance care- 
 lessly at the sunrise, and get used to Orion and 
 the Pleiades. The wonder wears off, and to-morrow 
 this sheet, in which a vision was let down to me 
 from Heaven, shall be the wrappage to a bar of 
 soap or the platter for a beggar's broken victuals." 
 These extracts show the quaint, delicious flavor 
 of Parson Wilbur's "Notes" — indeed, one great 
 charm of the Biglow Papers consists in these wise, 
 original, and quietly-humorous interludes. When 
 the death of the good parson is announced in the 
 second volume of the Biglow Papers, we feel as if 
 
THE BIGLOW PAPERS.— FIRST SERIES. 77 
 
 we had lost a personal friend, so real and vivid a 
 personage has the Rev. Homer Wilbur become to 
 the reader. 
 
 A burlesque of General Taylor's letter accepting 
 the nomination for the presidency, and two more 
 letters from "Birdofredum Sawin" conclude the 
 first series of the Biglow Papers which were imme- 
 diately gathered into- a volume, and published by 
 George Nichols of Cambridge. The staid " New 
 Englander " in its February issue of 1849 deigned(!) 
 to criticise the new book, as follows : — 
 
 "It may be questionable in the judgment of 
 some readers of the New Englander, whether the 
 serious and practicaL.tone of our grave quarterly 
 will permit us to occupy its pages with what we 
 feel disposed to say concerning young Hosea's first 
 appearance as author and Parson Wilbur's no less 
 noteworthy first appearance as editor. It may 
 surprise, and possibly offend, some very good peo- 
 ple, that we take any notice of a book which one 
 class of critics will regard only as a foolish attempt 
 to make people laugh, and which another class will 
 be sure to denounce as full of the most wicked and 
 diabolical mockery. And yet, though we have 
 laughed heartily — almost dangerously — over some 
 passages in these 'Biglow Papers,' it is by no means 
 with the desire to make the readers of this journal 
 
78 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 
 
 laugh, not even to amuse them, that we undertake 
 to say something about the spirit and contents of 
 this singular book. In fact, it is in sober earnest 
 that we would review a publication which has ruf- 
 fled the wonted quiescence of our cachinnatory 
 muscles more effectually than any other book of 
 the season. The book (of which James Russell 
 Lowell is said to be the author) is made up in this 
 way " : — Then follows a general plan of the book 
 which we omit as a repetition of what has already 
 been given, and to give space for some of the re- 
 maining criticisms which' are exceedingly interest- 
 ing, after a lapse of nearly four decades. 
 
 " Seemingly disconnected and inartificial enough, 
 to be sure, yet the plan of the book is not without 
 an object, and not without a peculiar fitness to 
 attain its object. And yet such as it is in plan, 
 order, and sentiment, compositions of far less mo- 
 ment have more than once been made the subject 
 of protracted study and elaborate criticism when 
 they have fortunately chanced to have been buried 
 some twenty generations under the dusty pall of 
 a dead language, or have treated of subjects that 
 come less directly athwart the selfish interests and 
 prejudices of the living and struggling world. Let 
 this same uncouth Yankee dialect have passed away 
 entirely from use, and the conflicting interests of 
 
THE BIGLOW PAPERS.— FIRST SERIES. 79 
 
 to-day have been supplanted by others of an entirely 
 different character, and it would not be stranger 
 than some things that have happened in the liter- 
 ary world, if some dilettante society should light 
 on a single copy of this book and should find in it 
 one of the most extraordinary productions of the 
 age, and should cause fac-simile copies to be struck 
 
 off for the especial use of its members 
 
 Probably no reader who feels himself capable of 
 judging, will recognize all the Yankeeisms of Hosea 
 as genuine, or as actually in use, Parson Wilbur's 
 strong assertion to the contrary notwithstanding; 
 and more probably still, all will regard the repre- 
 sentation as quite overdone, the variations from 
 the established usages of our language being more 
 numerous in the poem than they are in daily con- 
 versation. One reason for this impression on the 
 part of readers, we conceive to be the fact, that 
 many of the words which by a different spelling 
 are made to appear among the peculiarities of the 
 Yankee dialect, are yet only spelled according to 
 their real sound in well-spoken English. So that 
 if the text is read aloud according to the spelling 
 in the hearing of another person, the hearer will 
 recognize variations from the received standard of 
 our language only in a small part of the instances in 
 which he would see it, if his eye were on the page." 
 
8o JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 
 
 This last suggestion of reading aloud the dialect 
 poems of the Biglow Papers, is a most excellent 
 one. The ear recognizes much more readily than 
 the eye, the peculiarities of any idiomatic form of 
 speech, and, after all, our phonetic reformers rival 
 even Hosea in their astonishing modes of spelling 
 the ordinary words of every-day talk. What sounds 
 correctly to the ear, often looks very strangely on 
 the printed page ! 
 
 Says a certain English writer : 
 
 " To James Russell Lowell belongs the rank of 
 the prince of American humorists. It is sufficient 
 to prove his right to that title to say that to him 
 literature owes the Biglow Papers. If you would 
 have a portrayal of the rustic Yankee character — 
 the genuine Jonathan from the country, young and 
 old — the typical country parson and prosperous 
 newspaper-reading, politics-discussing, rustic-philo- 
 sophical farmer — in all their eccentricity, dry wit, 
 quaint thoughts and expressions, strong native 
 shrewdness, and entirely original modes of looking 
 at a subject, read, and re-read, and heartily laugh 
 at the effusions of the immortal Biglow. 
 
 " You feel, even while reading this thoroughly 
 ' up-country ' vernacular, that it is, nevertheless, 
 the production of a scholar, a philosopher, and a 
 humorist of the highest refinement. That coarse- 
 
THE BIGLOW PAPERS.— FIRST SERIES. 8i 
 
 ness and gross exaggeration which more than half 
 spoils the exuberant humor of A. Ward is wholly 
 wanting. Besides, you have always felt, in reading 
 the sayings of the 'Great American Showman,' 
 that there is a superficiality, a great lack of depth, 
 a hollowness and utter absence of originality in the 
 thoughts, ill-concealed even by the wholly original 
 style of expression and irresistibly funny notions. 
 There is far different material, a strikingly differ- 
 ent mental calibre, in the Biglow Papers. Under 
 the homely, humorous garb of rustic expression — 
 in itself marvellously true to nature and illustrative 
 of Yankee character — politics and philosophy are 
 discussed, and opinions forcibly sustained or bit- 
 terly satirized." 
 
CHAPTER VII. 
 
 FIRST EUROPEAN TRIP. 
 
 REFERRING to Longfellow's diary from 
 1840 to 1853, we find frequent mention of 
 Lowell. At one time Longfellow spends an even- 
 ing at Elmwood to meet Fredrika Bremer, whom 
 he finds "a very quiet little body — sewing lace on 
 her handkerchief all the evening." Another day 
 he dines with Emerson at Lowell's, where a new 
 club is planned, to dine together once a month. 
 On Christmas Day, 1850, he writes: "Story and 
 Lowell called on their way to town, looking so 
 young and full of strength and hope;" and on the 
 following day he adds : " I passed the afternoon 
 with the Storys in Lowell's study, having a pleas- 
 ant chat on Italy and art." 
 
 W. W. Story, the poet and sculptor, might al- 
 most be called Lowell's twin, for they were born 
 on the same month of the same year, were gradu- 
 ated from Harvard College in the same class, and 
 both studied law, only to leave the learned profes- 
 sion at call of the Muses. When Lowell wrote his 
 
 82 
 
FIRST EUROPEAN TRIP. 83 
 
 article for Putnam's Monthly, entitled " Cambridge 
 Thirty Years Ago," he arranged it in the form of 
 a letter addressed to " Edelmann Storg" — as a 
 Swiss innkeeper had once construed the name of 
 this intimate friend, "William Story." The de- 
 lightful poem, "An Invitation," is doubtless ad- 
 dressed to the same friend : — 
 
 " Come back our ancient walks to tread, 
 Dear haunts of lost or scattered friends. 
 Old Harvard's scholar-factories red, 
 Where song and smoke and laughter sped 
 The nights to proctor-haunted ends. 
 
 " Constant are all our former loves, 
 Unchanged the icehouse-girdled pond, 
 Its hemlock glooms, its shadowy coves. 
 Where floats the coot and never moves. 
 Its slopes of long-tamed green beyond. 
 
 " Our old familiars are not laid, 
 
 Though snapt our wands and sunk our books ; 
 
 They beckon not to be gainsaid. 
 
 Where, round broad meads that mowers wade. 
 
 The Charles his steel-blue sickle crooks. 
 
 " Come back ! Not ours the Old World's good. 
 The Old World's ill, thank God, not ours ; 
 But here, far better understood, 
 The days enforce our native mood. 
 And challenge all our manlier powers. 
 
84 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 
 
 " Kindlier to me the place of birth 
 That first my tottering footsteps trod ; 
 There may be fairer spots of earth 
 But all their glories are not worth 
 The virtue of the native sod." 
 
 A pleasant story is told concerning these two 
 friends by one who knew them intimately. When 
 Lowell had recited the Commemoration Ode at 
 Cambridge on the twenty-fifth of July, 1865, and 
 the crowd was just dispersing, a fine-looking man 
 pressed his way through the throng of people and 
 grasped the poet's hand. 
 
 "Why, William Story!" exclaimed Lowell in 
 astonishment, " when did you come over .■■ " 
 
 " I landed at Boston this morning. I had heard 
 you were to read a poem ; there was just time to 
 make the trip, and here I am." 
 
 " And so you have come from Rome merely to 
 hear me recite an ode.-" Well, it is just like you!" 
 returned the orator of the day, with hearty appre- 
 ciation. 
 
 Another intimate friend of Lowell's was Arthur 
 Hugh Clough, the English poet and scholar who 
 made his home in Cambridge for a short time. 
 Speaking of the approval of certain friends, Lowell 
 says in his introduction to the " Biglow Papers " : 
 "With a feeling too tender and grateful to be 
 
FIRST EUROPEAN TRIP. 
 
 8S 
 
 mixed with any vanity, I mention as one of these 
 the late A. H. Clough, who more than any one 
 of those I have known (no longer living), except 
 Hawthorne, impressed me with the constant pres- 
 ence of that indefinable thing we call genius." 
 
 Longfellow summons Lowell, Felton, Clough 
 and Charles Norton to feast on some English 
 grouse and pheasant, "and very good they were," 
 he adds, "both the guests and the game." 
 
 A few weeks later (January 5, 1853) Lowell gives 
 a supper to Thackeray. The other guests are 
 Felton, Clough, Dana, Dr. Parsons (Dante's trans- 
 lator), Estes Howe, and Longfellow. The latter 
 writes : " We sat down at ten and did not leave the 
 table till one. Very gay it was with stories and 
 jokes : — 
 
 " ' Will you take some Port ? ' said Lowell to 
 Thackeray. 
 
 " ' I dare drink anything that becomes a man.' 
 
 " ' It will be a long time before that becomes a 
 man.' 
 
 " ' O, no ! ' cried Felton, it is fasi turning into one' 
 
 " As we were going away, Thackeray said, ' We 
 have stayed too long.' 
 
 " ' I should say,' replied Lowell, ' one long and 
 too short — a dactylic supper.' " ' 
 
 Alluding to Clough, Longfellow says, " I like 
 
86 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 
 
 him exceedingly, with his gentleness and his be- 
 wildered look, and his half-closed eyes. This after- 
 noon we walked to see Lowell whom we found 
 musing before his fire in his study. His wife came 
 in, slender and pale as a lily." 
 
 In the summer of 185 1 Lowell and his wife went 
 to Europe in a sailing vessel, and spent a year 
 abroad. The voyage was taken with the hope of 
 bringing back health and strength to Mrs. Lowell, 
 and the greater part of their stay on the Continent 
 was spent in sunny Italy. 
 
 Of this first European trip, the poet has made a 
 few delightful notes from which we give the fol- 
 lowing quotations : — 
 
 "A cloudless sunrise in mid-ocean is beyond com- 
 parison for simple grandeur. It is like Dante's 
 style, bare and perfect. Naked sun meets naked 
 sea, the true classic of nature. There may be 
 more sentiment in morning on shore — the shiver- 
 ing fairy-jewelry of dew, the silver point-lace of 
 sparkling hoar-frost — but there is also more com- 
 plexity, more of the romantic. The one savors of 
 the elder Edda, the other of the Minnesingers. 
 
 " And I thus floating, lonely elf, 
 A kind of planet by myself, 
 The mists draw up and furl away, 
 And in the east a warning gray 
 
87 
 
 FIRST EUROPEAN TRIP. 
 
 Faint as the tints of oalcen woods 
 
 When o'er their buds May breathes and broods, 
 
 Tells that the golden sunrise-tide 
 
 Is lapsing up earth's thirsty side, 
 
 Each moment purpling on the crest 
 
 Of some stark billow farther west : 
 
 And as the sea-moss droops and hears 
 
 The gurgling flood that nears and nears, 
 
 And then with tremulous content 
 
 Floats out each thankful filament, 
 
 So waited I until it came, 
 
 God's daily miracle, — O shame 
 
 That I had seen so many days 
 
 Unthankful, without wondering praise, 
 
 Not recking more this bliss of earth 
 
 Than the cheap fire that lights my hearth ? 
 
 But now glad thoughts and holy pour 
 
 Into my heart, as once a year 
 
 To San Miniato's open door. 
 
 In long procession, chanting clear, 
 
 Through slopes of sun, through shadows hoar, 
 
 The coupled monks slow-climbing sing. 
 
 And like a golden censer swing 
 
 From rear to front, from front to rear 
 
 Their alternating bursts of praise. 
 
 Till the roof's fading seraphs gaze 
 
 Down through an odorous mist, that crawls 
 
 Lingeringly up the darkened walls. 
 
 And the dim arches, silent long, 
 
 Are startled with triumphant song." 
 
 "The most beautiful thing I have seen at sea, 
 all the more so that I had never heard of it, is the 
 
88 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 
 
 trail of a shoal of fish through the phosphorescent 
 water. It is like a flight of silver rockets, or the 
 streaming of northern lights through that silent 
 nether heaven. I thought nothing could go be- 
 yond that rustling star-foam which was churned 
 up by our ship's bows, or those eddies and disks 
 of dreamy flame that rose and wandered out of 
 sight behind us. 
 
 " 'Twas fire our ship was plunging through, 
 Cold fire that o'er the quarter flew ; 
 And wandering moons of idle flame 
 Grew full and waned, and went and came, 
 Dappling with light the huge sea-snake 
 That slid behind us in the wake. 
 
 " But there was something even more delicately 
 rare in the apparition of the fish, as they turned 
 up in gleaming furrows the latent moonshine which 
 the ocean seemed to have hoarded against these 
 vacant interlunar nights." 
 
 The poet's word picture of his first glimpse of 
 the European shore is like an exquisite painting 
 in water-color : — 
 
 " My first glimpse of Europe was the shore of 
 Spain. Since we got into the Mediterranean, we 
 have been becalmed for some days within easy 
 view of it. All along are fine mountains, brown 
 
FIRST EUROPE A AT TRIP. 
 
 89 
 
 all day, and with a bloom on them at sunset like 
 that of a ripe plum. Here and there at their feet 
 little white towns are sprinkled along the edge of 
 the water, like the grains of rice dropped by the 
 princess in the story. Sometimes we see larger 
 buildings on the mountain slopes, probably con- 
 vents. I sit and wonder whether the farther peaks 
 may not be the Sierra Morena (the rusty saw) of 
 Don Quixote. I resolve that they shall be, and 
 am content. 
 
 "The first sight of a shore so historical as that of 
 Europe gives an American a strange thrill. What 
 we always feel the artistic want of at home, is 
 background .... Surely, in all that con- 
 cerns aesthetics, Europeans have us at an immense 
 advantage. They start at a point which we arrive 
 at after weary years, for literature is not shut up in 
 books, nor art in galleries : both are taken in by 
 unconscious absorption through the finer pores of 
 mind and character in the atmosphere of society. 
 We are not yet out of our Crusoe-hood, and must 
 make our own tools as best we may. Yet I think 
 we shall find the good of it one of these days, in 
 being thrown back more wholly on nature ; and our 
 literature, when we have learned to feel our own 
 strength, and to respect our own thought because 
 
go JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 
 
 it is ours, and not because the European Mrs. 
 Grundy agrees with it, will have a fresh flavor and 
 a strong body that will recommend it, especially as 
 what we import is watered more and more liberally 
 with every vintage." 
 
 Again the poet takes his magic brush, and paints 
 for us the castles of the Rhine with all their 
 romantic surroundings : — 
 
 " Mountains of every shape and hue changed 
 their slow outlines ever as we moved, now opening, 
 now closing around us, sometimes peering solemnly 
 at us over each other's shoulders, and then sink- 
 ing slowly out of sight, or, at some sharp turn of 
 the path, seeming to stride into the valley and con- 
 front us with their craggy challenge, a challenge 
 which the little valleys accepted, if we did not, 
 matching their rarest tints of gray and brown, and 
 pink and purple, or that royal dye to make which 
 all these were profusely melted together for a mo- 
 ment's ornament, with as many shades of various 
 green and yellow. Gray towns crowded and clung 
 on the tops of peaks that seemed inaccessible. 
 We owe a great deal of picturesqueness to the 
 quarrels and thieveries of the barons of the Middle 
 Ages. The traveller and artist should put up a 
 prayer for their battered old souls. It was to be 
 
FIRST EUROPEAN TRIP. 91 
 
 out of their way and that of the Saracens that peo- 
 ple were driven to make their homes in spots so 
 sublime and inconvenient that the eye alone finds 
 it pleasant to climb up to them. Nothing else but 
 an American land-company ever managed to induce 
 settlers upon territory of such uninhabitable qual- 
 ity. I have seen an insect that makes a mask for 
 himself out of the lichens of the rock over which 
 he crawls, contriving so to deceive the birds ; and 
 the towns in this wild region would seem to have 
 been built on the same principle. Made of the 
 same stone with the cliffs on which they perch, 
 it asks good eyesight to make them out at the 
 distance of a few miles, and every wandering 
 mountain-mist annihilates them for the moment." 
 
 " We presently came to our ruin, and very noble 
 it was. The aqueduct had here been carried acrrf)ss 
 a deep gorge, and over the little brook which 
 whimpered along below towered an arch, as a bit 
 of Shakespeare bestrides the exiguous rill of a 
 discourse which it was intended to ornament. 
 The only human habitation in sight was a little 
 casetta on the top of a neighboring hill. What 
 else of man's work could be seen was a ruined 
 castle of the Middle Ages, and, far away upon the 
 horizon, the eternal dome. A valley in the moon 
 
92 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 
 
 could scarce have been lonelier, could scarce have 
 suggested more strongly the feeling of preteriteness 
 and extinction. The stream below did not seem so 
 much to sing as to murmur sadly, Coiiclusum est; 
 periisti! and the wind, sighing through the arch, 
 answered, Periisti ! Nor was the silence of Monte 
 Cavi without meaning. That cup, once full of 
 fiery wine, in which it pledged Vesuvius and Etna 
 later born, was brimmed with innocent water now. 
 Adam came upon the earth too late to see the 
 glare of its last orgy, lighting the eyes of saurians 
 in the reedy Campagna below. I almost fancied 
 I could hear a voice like that which cried to the 
 Egyptian pilot. Great Pan is dead! I was looking 
 into the dreary socket where once glowed the eye 
 that saw the whole earth vassal. Surely, this was 
 the world's autumn, and I could hear the feet of 
 Time rustling through the wreck of races and dy- 
 nasties, cheap and inconsiderable as fallen leaves." 
 
 " From Palestrina to Cavi the road winds along 
 a narrow valley, following the course of a stream 
 which rustles rather than roars below. Large 
 chestnut trees lean every way on the steep sides 
 of the hills above us, and at every opening we 
 could see great stretches of Campagna rolling 
 away and away toward the bases of purple mount- 
 
FIRST EUROPEAN TRIP. 53 
 
 ains streaked with snow. The sides of the road 
 were drifted with heaps of wild hawthorn and 
 honeysuckle in full bloom, and bubbling with innu- 
 merable nightingales that sang unseen. Overhead 
 the sunny sky tinkled with larks, as if the frost in 
 the air were breaking up and whirling away on the 
 swollen currents of spring." 
 
 " I am not ashamed to confess a singular sym- 
 pathy with what are known as the Middle Ages. 
 I cannot help thinking that few periods have left 
 behind them such traces of inventiveness and 
 power. Nothing is more tiresome than the same- 
 ness of modern cities ; and it has often struck me 
 that this must also have been true of those ancient 
 ones in which Greek architecture or its derivatives 
 prevailed — true at least as respects public build- 
 ings. But mediaeval towns, especially in Italy, 
 even when only fifty miles asunder, have an indi- 
 viduality of character as marked as that of trees. 
 Nor is it merely this originality that attracts me, 
 but likewise the sense that, however old, they are 
 nearer to me in being modern and Christian. I 
 find it harder to bridge over the gulf of Paganism 
 than of centuries. Apart from any difference in 
 the men, I had a far deeper emotion when I stood 
 on the Sasso di Dante, than at Horace's Sabine 
 
94 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 
 
 farm or by the tomb of Virgil. The latter, indeed, 
 interested me chiefly by its association with com- 
 paratively modern legend ; and one of the build- 
 ings I am most glad to have seen in Rome is the 
 Bear Inn where Montaigne lodged on his arrival." 
 
 And who but a poet like Lowell, with his sensi- 
 tive, dreamy nature, could make us feel with him 
 the impressiveness of St. Peter's t 
 
 "To me the noon silence and solitude of St. 
 Peter's were most impressive when the sunlight, 
 made visible by the mist of the ever-burning lamps 
 in which it was entangled, hovered under the dome 
 like the holy dove goldenly descending. Very 
 grahd also is the twilight, when all outlines melt 
 into mysterious vastness, and the arches expand 
 and lose themselves in the deepening shadow. 
 Then, standing in the deserted transept, you hear 
 the far-off vespers swell and die like low breathings 
 of the sea on some conjectured shore." 
 
 Mr. and Mrs. Lowell returned from Europe in 
 the autumn of 1852. The trip had been beneficial 
 in many ways, but Mrs. Lowell was still failing in 
 health, and soon passed into a rapid decline. On 
 the day of her death, in October, 1853, a child was 
 born to Longfellow, who, in tender sympathy, 
 writes that beautiful poem of " The Two Angels," 
 
MRST EUROPEAN TRIP. gj 
 
 "Two angels, one of Life and one of Death, 
 Passed o'er our village as the morning broke ; 
 
 The dawn was on their faces, and beneath. 
 The sombre houses hearsed with plumes of smoke. 
 
 " Their attitude and aspect were the same. 
 Alike their features and their robes of white ; 
 
 But one was crowned with amaranth, as with flame, 
 And one with asphodels, like flakes of light. 
 
 " 'Twas at thy door, O friend I and not at mine. 
 The angel with the amaranthine wreath. 
 
 Pausing, descended, and with voice divine, 
 Whispered a word that had a sound like Death. 
 
 " Then fell upon the house a sudden gloom, 
 A shadow on those features fair and thin ; 
 
 And softly from that hushed and darkened room. 
 Two angels issued, where but one went in. 
 
 " All is of God I If He but wave His hand, 
 The mists collect, the rain falls thick and loud. 
 
 Till, with a smile of light on sea and land, 
 Lo ! He looks back from the departing cloud. 
 
 "Angels of Life and Death alike are His; 
 
 Without His leave they pass no threshold o'er ; 
 Who, then, would wish or dare, believing this, 
 
 Against His messengers to shut the door ? " 
 
CHAPTER VIII. 
 
 ESSAYS AND LECTURES. 
 
 PUTNAM'S MONTHLY, conducted at this 
 time by George William Curtis and Charles 
 F. Briggs, was now the leading literary periodical 
 of the day, and many of Lowell's finest poems and 
 essays may be found within its columns. It was 
 here, as we have already stated, that " Cambridge 
 Thirty Years Ago" was first published; also, "A 
 W Jiter Hymn to my Fire " ; and here, if we mis- 
 take not, first appeared the " Moosehead Journal," 
 which was afterwards included in " Fireside Trav- 
 els," and from which the following pithy extracts 
 are given. 
 
 Speaking of a town in Maine, Lowell says : — 
 " It has a good chance of being pretty ; but, like 
 most American towns, it is in a hobbledehoy age, 
 growing yet, and one cannot tell what may happen. 
 A child with great promise of beauty is often 
 spoiled by its second teeth. There is something 
 agreeable in the sense of completeness which a 
 walled town gives one. It is entire, like a crystal 
 
 96 
 
T'i 
 
ESSAYS AND LECTURES. 
 
 97 
 
 — a work which man has succeeded in finishing. 
 I think the human mind pines more or less where 
 everything is new, and is better for a diet of stale 
 bread. The number of Americans who visit the 
 Old World is beginning to afford matter of specu- 
 lation to observant Europeans, and the deep inspi- 
 rations with which they breathe the air of antiquity, 
 as if their mental lungs had been starved with too 
 thin an atmosphere. For my own part, I never 
 saw a house which I thought old enough to be torn 
 down. It is too like that Scythian fashion of 
 knocking old people on the head. I cannot help 
 thinking that the indefinable something which we 
 call character is cumulative — that the influence 
 of the same climate, scenery, and associations for 
 several generations is necessary to its gathering 
 head, and that the process is disturbed by contin- 
 ual change of place. The American is nohiadic in 
 religion, in ideas, in morals, and leaves his faith 
 and opinions with as much indifference as the 
 house in which he was born. However, we need 
 not bother ; Nature takes care not to leave out of 
 the great heart of society either of its two ventri- 
 cles of hold-back and go-ahead. 
 
 "We should have to be shipwrecked on Juan 
 Fernandez not to find men who knew more than 
 
gS JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 
 
 we. In these travelling encounters one is thrown 
 upon his own resources, and is worth just what he 
 carries about him. The social currency of home, 
 the smooth-worn coin which passes freely among 
 friends and neighbors, is of no account. We are 
 thrown back upon the old system of barter ; and, 
 even with savages, we bring away only as much of 
 the wild wealth of the woods as we carry beads of 
 thought and experience, strung one by one in 
 painful years, to pay for them. A useful old jack- 
 knife will buy more than the daintiest Louis 
 Quinze paper-folder fresh from Paris. Perhaps 
 the kind of intelligence one gets in these out-of- 
 the-way places is the best — where one takes a 
 fresh man after breakfast instead of the damp 
 morning paper, and where the magnetic telegraph 
 of human sympathy flashes swift news from brain 
 to brain." 
 
 At another time, describing their course down 
 the river, he says : — 
 
 "The motion of the birch (canoe) reminded me 
 of the gondola, and they represent among water- 
 craft the felidoe, the cat tribe, stealthy, silent, 
 treacherous, and preying by night. I closed my 
 eyes, and strove to fancy myself in the dumb city, 
 whose only horses are the bronze ones of St. Mark. 
 But Nature would allow no rival, and bent down 
 
ESSAYS AND LECTURES. gg 
 
 an alder-bough to brush my cheek and recall me. 
 Only the robin sings in the emerald chambers of 
 these tall sylvan palaces, and the squirrel leaps 
 from hanging balcony to balcony. 
 
 "The rains which the loons foreboded had raised 
 the west branch of the Penobscot so much, that a 
 strong current was setting back into the pond ; 
 and, when at last we brushed through into the 
 river, it was full to the brim — too full for moose, 
 the hunters said. Rivers with low banks have al- 
 ways the compensation of giving a sense of entire 
 fulness. The sun sank behind its horizon of pines, 
 whose pointed summits notched the rosy west in 
 an endless black sierra. At the same moment the 
 golden moon swung slowly up in the east, like the 
 other scale of that Homeric balance in which Zeus 
 weighed the deeds of men. Sunset and moonrise 
 at once ! Adam had no more in Eden — except 
 the head of Eve upon his shoulder. The stream 
 was so smooth, that the floating logs we met 
 seemed to hang in a glowing atmosphere, the 
 shadow-half being as real as the solid. And grad- 
 ually the mind was etherized to a like dreamy pla- 
 cidity, till fact and fancy, the substance and the 
 image, floating on the current of reverie, became but 
 as the upper and under halves of one unreal reality. 
 
 " In the west still lingered a pale-green light. I 
 
loo JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 
 
 do not know whether it be from greater familiarity, 
 but it always seems to me that the pinnacles of 
 pine-trees make an edge to the landscape which 
 tells better against the twilight, or the fainter 
 dawn before the rising moon, than the rounded 
 and cloud-cumulus outline of hard-wood trees." 
 
 The following anecdote is given by Lowell with 
 his own inimitable humor : — 
 
 " Nineteen years ago I was walking through 
 Franconia Notch and stopped to chat with a her- 
 mit, who fed with gradual logs the unwearied teeth 
 of a Eaw-mill. As the panting steel slit off the 
 slabs of the log, so did the less willing machine of 
 talk, acquiring a steadier up-and-down motion, pare 
 away that outward bark of conversation which 
 protects the core, and which, like other bark, has 
 naturally most to do with the weather, the season, 
 and the heat of the day. At length I asked him 
 the best point of view for the Old Man of the 
 Mountain. 
 
 " 'Dunno — never see it.' 
 
 "Too young and too happy either to feel or 
 affect the juvenalian indifference, I was sincerely 
 astonished, and I expressed it. 
 
 "The log-compelling man attempted no justifi- 
 cation, but after a little qsked, ' Come from Bawsn V 
 
 " ' Yes ' (with peninsula pride). 
 
ASSAYS AND LECTURES. loi 
 
 " ' Goodie to see in the vycinity o' Bawsn.' 
 
 " ' O yes ! ' I said, and I thought — see Boston 
 and die ! see the State Houses, old and new, the 
 caterpillar wooden bridges crawling with innumer- 
 able legs across the flats of Charles; see the Com- 
 mon — the largest park, doubtless, in the world — 
 with its files of trees planted as if by a drill ser- 
 geant, and then for your nunc dimittis ! 
 
 '"I should like, awl, I should like to stan' on 
 Bunker Hill. You've ben there offen, likely ? ' 
 
 " ' N-o-o-,' unwillingly, seeing the little end of 
 the horn in clear vision at the terminus of this 
 Socratic perspective. 
 
 " ' Awl, my young frien', you've lamed neow thet 
 wut a man kin see any day for nawthin', childern 
 half price, he never doos see. Nawthin' pay, naw- 
 thin' vally.' 
 
 "With this modern instance of a wise saw, I 
 departed, deeply revolving these things with my- 
 self, and convinced that, whatever the ratio of pop- 
 ulation, the average amount of human nature to 
 the square mile is the same the world over. I 
 thought of it when I saw people upon the Pincian 
 wondering at the Alchemist sun, as if he never 
 burned the leaden clouds to gold in sight of Charles 
 Street. I thought of it when I found eyes first 
 discovering at Mont Blanc how beautiful snow 
 
I02 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 
 
 was. As I walked on, I said to myself, There is 
 one exception, wise hermit — it is just X\\t.?>& gratis 
 pictures which the poet puts in his show-box, and 
 which we all gladly pay Wordsworth and the rest 
 for a peep at. The divine faculty is to see what 
 everybody can look at." * 
 
 In Longfellow's journal of the eighth of January, 
 1855, we read: — 
 
 " Lowell came in the evening, and we talked 
 about his lectures on poetry which begin to-morrow 
 (in the Lowell Institute course)." 
 
 On the following day he writes : — " Mr. Richard 
 Grant White of New York, author of 'Shake- 
 speare's Scholars,' came to tea. He drove in with 
 us to hear Lowell's first lecture, an admirable per- 
 formance and a crowded audience. After it we 
 drove out to Norton's, where with T. and the lect- 
 urer we had a pleasant supper." On the twen- 
 tieth, he makes another note of Lowell's lectures, 
 this one being upon the old English ballads, and 
 "one of the best of the course." 
 
 A few days later, Longfellow exclaims : — 
 
 "Lowell is to be my successor! Dr. Walker 
 talked with me about it this morning. I have 
 been to see Lowell, and the matter is as good as 
 settled. I am sorry for some of my friends who 
 wish the place." 
 
ASSAYS AND LECTURES. 103 
 
 Ten years before, Lowell — then in his twenty- 
 fifth year — had published a small volume entitled 
 "Conversations on some of the Old Poets." In 
 this book may be clearly seen his peculiar talent, 
 even then, for literary criticism. One " Conversa- 
 tion" is upon Chaucer, whose simplicity of style is 
 strongly contrasted with the artificiality of Pope. 
 Of the latter writer he says : " He treated the 
 English language as the image-man has served the 
 bust of Shakespeare yonder. To rid it of some 
 external soils he has rubbed it down till there is 
 no muscular expression left. ... A poet could 
 not write the Dunciad, nor read it." 
 
 A large part of this early volume is given to 
 comments upon Spenser, Chapman, Drayton, Mar- 
 lowe, Ford, Man.'-ell, and old Jeremy Taylor whose 
 quaint originality is dwelt upon with much enthusi- 
 asm. And now, as will be seen, a decade of years 
 has but ripened, not changed, the poet's judgment." 
 
 " He still reigns in literary tradition," says 
 Lowell of Dryden, " as when at Will's his elbow- 
 chair had the best place by the fire in winter, or 
 on the balcony in summer, and when a pinch from 
 his snuff-box made a young author blush with 
 pleasure as would nowadays a favorable notice in 
 the 'Saturday Review.' What gave and secures 
 for him this singular eminence .'' To put it in a 
 
104 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 
 
 single word, I think that his qualities and faculties 
 were in that rare combination which makes char- 
 acter. This gave flavor to whatever he wrote — a 
 very rare quality. 
 
 "Was he then a great poet.' Hardly, in the 
 narrowest definition. But he was a strong thinker 
 who sometimes carried common sense to a height 
 where it catches the light of a dimmer air, and 
 warmed reason till it had well-nigh the illuminating 
 property of intuition. Certainly he is not, like 
 Spenser, the poets' poet, but other men have also 
 their rights. Even the Philistine is a man and a 
 brother, and is entirely right so far as he sees. To 
 demand more of him is to be unreasonable. And 
 he sees, among other things, that a man who under- 
 takes to write should first have a meaning perfectly 
 defined to himself, and then should be able to set it 
 forth clearly in the best words. This is precisely 
 Dryden's praise, and amid the rickety sentiment 
 looming big through misty phrase which marks so 
 much of modern literature, to read him is as bracing 
 as a northwest wind. He blows the mind clear. In 
 ripeness of mind and bluff heartiness of expression, 
 he takes rank with the best. His phrase is always 
 a short-cut to his sense, for his estate was too spa- 
 cious for him to need that trick of winding the 
 path of his thought about, and planting it out with 
 
ESSAYS AND LECTURES. 
 
 I OS 
 
 clumps of epithet, by which the landscape-gardeners 
 of literature give to a paltry half-acre the air of a 
 park. In poetry, to be next-best is, in one sense, 
 to be nothing ; and yet to be among the first in 
 any kind of writing, as Dryden certainly was, is to 
 be one of a very small company. He had beyond 
 most, the gift of the right word. And if he does 
 not, like one or two of the greater masters of song, 
 stir our sympathies by that indefinable aroma so 
 magical in arousing the subtile associations of the 
 soul, he has this in common with the few great 
 writers, that the winged seeds of his thought embed 
 themselves in the memory and germinate there. 
 If I could be guilty of the absurdity of recom- 
 mending to a young man any atithor on whom to 
 form his style, I should tell him that, next to 
 having something that will not stay unsaid, he 
 could find no safer guide than Dryden." 
 
 Again, when analyzing the wonderful power in 
 Shakespeare's Dramas, he says, — 
 
 " The secret of force in writing lies not so much 
 in the pedigree of nouns and adjectives and verbs, 
 as in having something that you believe in to say, 
 and making the parts of speech vividly conscious 
 of it." . . . 
 
 " In the experiments made for casting the great 
 bell for the Westminster Tower, it was found that 
 
lo6 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 
 
 the superstition which attributed the remarkable 
 sweetness and purity of tone in certain old bells 
 to the larger mixture of silver in their composition 
 had no foundation in fact. It was the cunning 
 proportion in which the ordinary metals were bal- 
 anced against each other, the perfection of form, 
 and the nice gradations of thickness, that wrought 
 the miracle. And it is precisely so with the lan- 
 guage of poetry. The genius of the poet will tell 
 him what word to use (else what use in his being 
 poet at all .■' ) ; and even then, unless the proportion 
 and form, whether of parts or whole, be all that 
 Art requires and the most sensitive taste finds 
 satisfaction in, he will have failed to make what 
 shall vibrate through all its parts with a silvery 
 unison, — in other words, a poem. . . . 
 
 " Mere vividness of expression, such as makes 
 quotable passages, comes of the complete sur- 
 render of self to the impression, whether spiritual 
 or sensual, of the moment. It is a quality, perhaps, 
 in which the young poet is richer than the mature, 
 his very inexperience making him more venture- 
 some in those leaps of language that startle us 
 with their rashness only to bewitch us the more 
 with the happy ease of their accomplishment. For 
 this there are no existing laws of rhetoric, for it is 
 from such felicities that the rhetoricians deduce 
 
£SSj1vs and lectures. 
 
 107 
 
 and codify their statutes. It is something which 
 cannot be improved upon or cultivated, for it is 
 immediate and intuitive. But this power of expres- 
 sion is subsidiary, and goes only a little way toward 
 the making of a great poet. Imagination, where 
 it is truly creative, is a faculty, and not a quality ; 
 it looks before and after, it gives the form that 
 makes all the parts work together harmoniously 
 toward a given end, its seat is in the higher reason, 
 and it is efficient only as a servant of the will." 
 
 Lowell had now formally received his appointment 
 of professor of belles-lettres at Harvard University, 
 with leave of absence for two years, which was to 
 be spent in study abroad. Longfellow writes on the 
 seventeenth of May, 1855: — "A beautiful morning. 
 Went and sat an hour with Lowell in his upper 
 chamber among the tree tops. He sails for Havre 
 the first of June." On the twenty-ninth, he adds : 
 — " Lowell's friends gave him a farewell dinner at 
 the Revere, whereat I had the honor of presiding. 
 A joyous banquet; one of the pleasantest I ever 
 attended, — a meeting of friends to take leave of 
 a friend whom we all love." 
 
 On the thirtieth, Longfellow drives into town 
 with Lowell. " Saw him and Sumner depart for 
 New York. Farewell to the Poet for a year, and 
 to the Senator for a month or two ! " 
 
I08 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 
 
 Lowell remained abroad until the spring of 1857, 
 spending most of his time in Dresden, where he 
 perfected his knowledge of the German language. 
 The estimation in which he then held, and still 
 holds, the study of Greek is clearly set forth in 
 the following extract from one of his lectures : — 
 
 " The true poetic imagination is of one quality^ 
 whether it be ancient or modern, and equally sub- 
 ject to those laws of grace, of proportion, of design, 
 in whose free service, and in that alone, it can be- 
 come art. Those laws are something which do not 
 
 " Alter when they alteration find, 
 And bend with the remover to remove. 
 
 And they are more clearly to be deduced from the 
 eminent examples of Greek literature than from 
 any other source. 
 
 " It is the advantage of this select company of 
 ancients that their works are defecated of all turbid 
 mixture of contemporaneousness, and have become 
 to us pure literature, our judgment and enjoyment 
 of which cannot be vulgarized by any prejudices 
 of time or place. This is why the study of them 
 is fitly called a liberal education, because it eman- 
 cipates the mind from every narrow provincialism 
 whether of egoism or tradition, and is the appren- 
 ticeship that everyone must serve before becoming 
 
ASSAYS AND LECTURES. 109 
 
 a free brother of the guild which passes the torch 
 of life from age to age. There would be no dispute 
 about the advantages of that Greek culture which 
 Schiller advocated with such generous eloquence, 
 if the great authors of antiquity had not been de- 
 graded from teachers of thinking to drillers in 
 grammar, and made the ruthless pedagogues of 
 root and inflection, instead of companions for whose 
 society the mind must put on her highest mood. 
 The discouraged youth too naturally transfers the 
 epithet of dead from the languages to the authors 
 that wrote in them. 
 
 " What concern have we with the shades of dialect 
 in Homer or Theocritus, provided they speak the 
 spiritual lingua franca that abolishes all alienage 
 of race, and makes whatever shore of time we land 
 on hospitable and homelike 1 
 
 " There is much that is deciduous in books, but all 
 that gives them a title to rank as literature in the 
 highest sense is perennial. Their vitality is the 
 vitality not of one or another blood or tongue, but 
 of human nature ; their truth is not topical and 
 transitory, but of universal acceptations ; and thus 
 all great authors seem the coevals not only of each 
 other, but of whoever reads them, growing wiser 
 with him as he grows wise, and unlocking to him 
 one secret after another as his own life and experi- 
 
no JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 
 
 ence give him the key, but on no other condition. 
 Their meaning is absolute, not conditional ; it is a 
 property of theirs, quite irrespective of manners or 
 creed ; for the highest culture, the development of 
 the individual by observation, reflection, and study, 
 leads to one result, whether in Athens or in London. 
 The more we know of ancient literature, the more 
 we are struck with its modernness, just as the 
 more we study the maturer dramas of Shakespeare, 
 the more we feel his nearness in certain primary 
 qualities to the antique and classical. Yet even in 
 saying this, I tacitly make the admission that it is 
 the Greeks who must furnish us with our standard 
 of comparison. Their stamp is upon all the allowed 
 measures and weights of aesthetic criticism. Nor 
 does a consciousness of this, nor a constant refer- 
 ence to it, in any sense reduce us to the mere 
 copying of a by-gone excellence ; for it is the test 
 of excellence in any department of art that it can 
 never be bygone, and it is not mere difference 
 from antique models, but the way in which that 
 difference is shown, the direction it takes, that we 
 are to consider in our judgment of a modern work. 
 The model is not there to be copied merely, but 
 that the study of it may lead us insensibly to the 
 same processes of thought by which its purity of 
 outline and harmony of parts were attained. 
 
CHAPTER IX. 
 
 THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY, SECOND MARRIACjE, LIFE 
 AT ELMWOOD. 
 
 SOON after Lowell's return from Europe, he 
 consults Longfellow as to the feasibility of 
 starting a new magazine. " I told him," writes 
 Longfellow, " that I would write for it if I wrote 
 for any magazine." A few days later he "dines 
 in town at Parker's with Emerson, Lowell, Motley, 
 Holmes, Cabot, Underwood, and the publisher 
 Phillips, to talk about the new magazine which 
 the latter wishes to establish." 
 
 "It will no doubt be done," adds Longfellow, 
 " though I am not so eager about it as the rest." 
 At another dinner in town with the new Magazine 
 Club, the title, etc., is discussed, but with no result. 
 In November of that same year, however, " The 
 Atlantic Monthly " is fairly launched upon the 
 great sea of literature, and James Russell Lowell 
 is chosen as its editor. 
 
 In the first number of the new magazine Long- 
 fellow, true to his promise, is numbered among the 
 
112 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 
 
 contributors, and sends the editor his beautiful 
 poem in honor of Florence Nightingale, — " Santa 
 Filomena." Lowell himself contributes an amus- 
 ing fable entitled, " The Origin of Didactic Poetry," 
 and other well-known lights in the literary world 
 are ably represented in this first number of " The 
 Atlantic Monthly." 
 
 The new magazine was started on the anti-slavery 
 platform, and political articles of great ability were 
 often published in its columns. The editor himself 
 writes "A Pocket Celebration of the Fourth" and 
 " A Sample of Consistency " — both of a political 
 character — which were published in some of the 
 earlier numbers ; and one poem, " The Nest," which 
 was written for the magazine, has never re-appeared 
 in the " complete " edition of the poet's works. 
 
 Lowell continued editor of " The Atlantic 
 Monthly " for five years. During this time, the 
 senior members of the publishing house of Phillips 
 and Sampson both died, and the financial manage- 
 ment of the magazine was transferred to Ticknor 
 and Fields. 
 
 Lowell was also editor of the " North American 
 Review" from 1863 to 1872. 
 
 It was in the autumn of 1857 that Mr. Lowell 
 was. married to Miss Frances Dunlap of Portland, 
 an estimable lady who had had charge of the educa- 
 
THE ATLANTIC— SECOND MARRIAGE. 113 
 
 tion of his daughter during his stay in Europe. 
 For a while he made his home with Doctor Estes 
 Howe on Oxford Street, Cambridge, but soon re- 
 turned to his beloved Elmwood. 
 
 Of his quiet, happy life in the old parsonage 
 we have many charming pictures : — 
 
 " The house, an old-fashioned, roomy mansion, 
 set in a large triangular wooded space, with grassy 
 areas, under the brow of Mount Auburn, has been 
 familiarized through description and picture ; and 
 the author himself, of medium height, well set, 
 with a substantial form and a strikingly attractive 
 face, of light complexion, full eyes, mobile and 
 expressive features, with the beard and drooping 
 mustache which are so marked a trait of his picture, 
 and now, like the hair, turning gray, — he, too, 
 is no stranger. Some ten years ago this figure, in 
 the ' reefer ' which he then wore, was well known 
 in the college yard, giving an impression of stout- 
 ness, and almost bluffness, until one caught sight 
 of the face with its half-recognition and good-will 
 to the younger men ; and in his own study or on 
 the leafy veranda of the house, one perceived only 
 the simplest elements of unconscious dignity, the 
 frankness of complete cultivation, and the perfect 
 welcome. If one passed into his home at that 
 time he would have found a hall that opened out 
 
114 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 
 
 into large rooms on either hand, the whole fur- 
 nished in simple and solid fashion, with a look 
 that betokened long inhabitancy by the family ; 
 and on the left hand he would have entered the 
 study with its windows overlooking long green 
 levels among the trees on the lawn, for though 
 the estate is not very extensive in this direction, 
 the planting has been such that the seclusion 
 seems as inviolable as in the more distant country. 
 The attachment of its owner to these 'paternal 
 acres ' is sufficient to explain why when others 
 left Cambridge in summer — and then it is as 
 quiet as Pisa — he still found it ' good enough 
 country ' for him ; but besides this affection for 
 the soil, the landscape itself has a charm that 
 would content a poet. To the rear of this room, 
 or rather of its chimney, for there was no parti- 
 tion, was another, whose windows showed the 
 grove and shrubbery at the back toward the hill ; 
 and this view was perhaps the more peaceful. 
 
 " Here in these two rooms were the usual fur- 
 nishings of a scholar's study — tables and easy- 
 chairs, pictures and pipes, the whole lending itself 
 to an effect of lightness and simplicity, with the 
 straw-matting islanded with books and (especially 
 in the further room) strewn with scholar's litter, 
 from the midst of which one day the poet, in 
 
THE ATLANTIC — SECOND MARRIAGE. nj 
 
 search of 'what might be there,' drew from 
 nearly under my feet the manuscript of Clough's 
 ' Amours de Voyage.' The books filled the shelves 
 upon the wall, everywhere, and a library more 
 distinctly gathered for the mere love of literature 
 is not to be found. It is not large as libraries go 
 — some four thousand volumes. To tell its treas- 
 ures would be to catalogue the best works of man 
 in many languages. Perhaps its foundation-stone, 
 in a sense, is a beautiful copy of the first Shakes- 
 peare folio ; Lord Vernon's Dante is among the 
 ' tallest ' volumes, and there are many rare works 
 in much smaller compass. The range in English 
 is perhaps the most sweeping, but the precious 
 part to the bibliophile is the collection, a very 
 rich one, of the old French and other Romantic 
 poetry. More interesting in a personal way are 
 the volumes one picks up at random, which are 
 mile-stones of an active literary life — old Eng- 
 lish romances, where the rivulet is not of the text 
 but of the blue-pencil, the preliminary stage of a 
 trenchant essay on some Halliwell 'perhaps ; or 
 possibly some waif of a useless task, like a re- 
 edited Donne, to whose manes the unpoetic pub- 
 lisher was unwilling to make a financial sacrifice." 
 " For many years," writes the poet from Elm- 
 wood, " I have been in the habit of noting down 
 
ii6 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 
 
 .some of the leading events of my embowered 
 solitude, such as the coming of certain birds and 
 the like — a kind of memoires potir 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 horo- 
 scope of a whole season, and letting us know be- 
 forehand whether the winter will be severe or the 
 summer rainless. ... 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 thatch- 
 ing, just before a snowstorm 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 
 
THE ATLANTIC — SECOND MARRIAGE. 
 
 117 
 
 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 them. It would 
 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 
 swallows leave us early, for example, apparently 
 so soon as their latest fledgelings are firm enough 
 of wing to attempt 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 when- 
 ever the snow lies long and deep on the ground, a 
 flock of cedar-birds comes in mid-winter 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, handsomest of flycatch- 
 ers, built in my orchard ; though I always know 
 
li8 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 
 
 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 prospecting 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 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 un- 
 rivalled. There are a hundred singing like one. 
 They are noisy enough then, and sing, as poets 
 should, with no afterthought. But when ifhey 
 come after cherries to the tree near my window, 
 they mufHe their voices, and their faint pip, pip, 
 pop ! sounds far away at the bottom of the garden, 
 where they know I shall not suspect them of rob- 
 bing the great black-walnut of its bitter-rinded 
 store. 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 
 
THE ATLANTIC— SECOND MARRIAGE. 
 
 119 
 
 out of a steak, and then gulped him, they stand up 
 in honest self-confidence, expand their red waist- 
 coats with the virtuous air of a lobby member, and 
 outface you with an eye that calmly challenges in- 
 quiry. ' Do / look like a bird that knows the flavor 
 of raw vermin ? I throw myself upon a jury of my 
 peers. Ask any robin if he ever ate anything less 
 aesthetic than the frugal berry of the juniper, and 
 he will answer, that his vow forbids him.' Can 
 such an open bosom cover such depravity 1 Alas, 
 yes ! I have no doubt his breast was redder at 
 that very moment with the blood of my raspberries. 
 On the whole, he is a doubtful friend in the gar- 
 den. He makes his dessert of all kinds of berries, 
 and is not averse to early pears. But when we 
 remember how omnivorous he is, eating his own 
 weight in an incredibly short time, and that nature 
 seems exhaustless 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 .cheerfulness and kind 
 neighborhood than many berries." 
 
 Again looking from his study windows, Lowell, 
 with the keen eye of a naturalist, makes the fol- 
 lowing notes : — 
 
 " Certain birds have disappeared from our neigh- 
 
120 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 
 
 borhood within my memory. I remember when the 
 whip-poor-will could be heard in Sweet Auburn. 
 The night-hawk, once common, is now rare. The 
 brown thrush has moved farther up country. For 
 years I have not seen or heard any of the larger 
 owls, whose hooting was one of my boyish terrors. 
 The cliff-swallow, strange emigrant, that eastward 
 takes his way, has come and gon^ again in my 
 time. The bank-swallows, well-nigh innumerable 
 during my boyhood, no longer frequent the crumbly 
 cliff of the gravel-pit by the river. The barn-swal- 
 lows, which once swarmed in our barn, flashing 
 through the dusty sunstreaks of the mow, have 
 been gone these many years. My father would 
 lead me out to see them gather on the roof, and 
 take counsel before their yearly migration, as Mr. 
 White used to see them at Selborne. Eheu, 
 fiigaces ! Thank fortune, the swift still glues his 
 nest, and rolls his distant thunders night and day 
 in the wide-throated chimneys, still sprinkles the 
 evening air with his merry twittering. The pop- 
 ulous heronry in Fresh Pond meadows has been 
 well-nigh broken up, but still a pair or two haunt 
 the old home, as the gypsies of Ellangowan their 
 ruined huts, and every evening fly over us river- 
 wards, clearing their throats with a hoarse hawk 
 as they go, and, in cloudy weather, scarce higher 
 
THE ATLANTIC— SECOND MARRIAGE. 121 
 
 than the tops of the chimneys. Sometimes I have 
 known one to alight in one of our trees, though 
 for what purpose I never could divine. Kingfish- 
 ers have sometimes puzzled me in the same way, 
 perched at high noon in a pine, springing their 
 watchman's rattle when they flitted away from my 
 curiosity, and seeming to shove their top-heavy 
 heads along as a man does a wheelbarrow. 
 
 " Some birds have left us, I suppose, because 
 the country is growing less wild. I once found a 
 summer duck's nest within quarter of a mile of our 
 house, but such a trouvaille would be impossible 
 now as Kidd's treasure. And yet the mere tam- 
 ing of the neighborhood does not quite satisfy me 
 as an explanation. Twenty years ago, on my way 
 to bathe in the river, I saw every day a brace of 
 woodcock, on the miry edge of a spring within a 
 few rods of a house, and constantly visited by 
 thirsty cows. There was no growth of any kind to 
 conceal them, and yet these ordinarily shy birds 
 were almost as indifferent to my passing as common 
 poultry would have been. Since bird-nesting has 
 become scientific, and dignified itself as oology, that, 
 no doubt, is partly to blame for some of our losses. 
 But some old friends are constant. Wilson's thrush 
 comes every year to remind me of that most poetic 
 of ornithologists. He flits before me through the 
 
122 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 
 
 pine-walk like the very genius of solitude. A pair 
 of pewees have built immemorially on a jutting 
 brick in the arched entrance to the ice-house. 
 Always on the same brick, and never more than a 
 single pair, though two broods of five each are 
 raised there every summer. 
 
 " The dead limbs of our elms, which I spare to 
 that end, bring us the flicker every summer, and 
 almost daily I hear his wild scream and laugh close 
 at hand, himself invisible. He is a shy bird, but a 
 few days ago I had the satisfaction of studying him 
 through the blinds as he sat on a tree within a few 
 feet of me. Seen so near and at rest, he makes 
 good his claim to the title of pigeon-woodpecker. 
 Lumberers have a notion that he is harmful to 
 timber, digging little holes through the bark to en- 
 courage the settlement of insects. The regular 
 rings of such perforations which one may see in 
 any apple-orchard seem to give some probability 
 to this theory. Almost every season a solitary 
 quail visits us, and, unseen among the currant- 
 bushes, calls Bob White, Bob White, as if he were 
 playing at hide-and-seek with that imaginary being. 
 A rarer visitant is the turtle-dove, whose pleasant 
 coo (something like the muffled crow of a cock 
 from a coop covered with snow) I have sometimes 
 
THE ATLANTIC— SECOND MARRIAGE. 123 
 
 heard, and whom I once had the good luck to see 
 close by me in the mulberry-tree." 
 
 Like White's " Selburne," only more finished in 
 its style, reads the following : — 
 
 "There is something inexpressibly dear to me 
 in these old friendships of a lifetime. There is 
 scarce a tree of mine but has had, at some time or 
 other, a happy homestead among its boughs, to 
 which I cannot say, 
 
 " ' Many light hearts and wings, 
 
 Which now be dead, lodged in thy living bowers.' 
 
 "My walk under the pines would lose half its 
 summer charm were I to miss that shy anchorite, 
 the Wilson's thrush, nor hear in haying-time the 
 metallic ring of his song, tljat justifies his rustic 
 name of scythe-whet. 
 
 "I protect my game as jealously as an English 
 squire. If anybody had oologized a certain cuckoo's 
 nest I know of (I have a pair in my garden every 
 year), it would have left me a sore place in my 
 mind for weeks. I love to bring these aborigines 
 back to the mansuetude they showed to the early 
 voyagers, and before (forgive the involuntary pun) 
 they had grown accustomed to man and knew 
 his savage ways. And they repay your kindness 
 
124 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 
 
 with a sweet familiarity too delicate ever to breed 
 contempt. I have made a Penn-treaty with them, 
 preferring that to the Puritan way with the natives, 
 which converted them to a little Hebraism and a 
 great deal of Medford rum. If they will not come 
 near enough to me (as most of them will), I bring 
 them close with an opera-glass, — a much better 
 weapon than a gun. I would not, if I could, con- 
 vert them from their pretty pagan ways." 
 
 And when the season changes and bleak winter 
 reigns at Elmwood, the poet's eye is still open to 
 the beauties of Nature : — 
 
 "The preludings of Winter are as beautiful as 
 those of Spring. In a gray December day, when, 
 as the farmers say, it is too cold to snow, his 
 numbed fingers will let fall doubtfully a few star- 
 shaped flakes, the snow-drops and anemones that 
 harbinger his more assured reign. Now, and now 
 only, may be seen heaped on the horizon's eastern 
 €dge, those ' blue clouds ' from forth which Shake- 
 speare says that Mars 'doth pluck the masoned 
 turrets.' 
 
 " Sometimes, also, when the sun is low, you will 
 see a single cloud trailing a flurry of snow along 
 the southern hills in a wavering fringe of purple. 
 And when at last the real snowstorm comes, it 
 leaves the earth with a virginal look on it that no 
 
THE ATLANTIC— SECOND MARRIAGE. 125 
 
 Other of the seasons can rival, — compared with 
 which, indeed, they seem soiled and vulgar. 
 
 "And what is there in nature so beautiful as 
 the next morning after such confusion of the 
 elements ? Night has no silence like this of busy- 
 day. All the batteries of noise are spiked. We 
 see the movement of life as a deaf man sees it, a 
 mere wraith of the clamorous existence that inflicts 
 itself on our ears when the ground is bare. The 
 earth is clothed in innocence as a garment. Every 
 wound of the landscape is healed ; whatever was 
 stiff has been sweetly rounded as the breasts of 
 Aphrodite; what was unsightly has been covered 
 gently with a soft splendor, as if, Cowley would 
 have said, Nature had cleverly let fall her hand- 
 kerchief to hide it. If the Virgin (Notre Dame de 
 la neige) were to come back, here is an earth that 
 would not bruise her foot nor stain it." 
 
 The following extract from Lowell's Note-book 
 reminds one of his beautiful winter picture in " Sir 
 Launfal": — 
 
 " What a cunning silversmith is Frost ! The 
 rarest workmanship of Delhi or Genoa copies him 
 but clumsily, as if the fingers of all other artists 
 were thumbs. Fernwork and lacework and filagree 
 in endless variety, and under it all the water tinkles 
 like a distant guitar, or drums like a tambourine, or 
 
126 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 
 
 gurgles like the Tokay of an anchorite's dream. 
 Beyond doubt there is a fairy procession marching 
 along those frail arcades and translucent corridors. 
 
 ' Their oaten pipes blow wondrous shrill, 
 The hemlock small blow clear.' 
 
 And hark ! is that the ringing of Titania's bridle, 
 or the bells of the wee, wee hawk that sits on 
 Oberon's wrist } This wonder of Frost's handi- 
 work may be had every winter, but he can do better 
 than this, though I have seen it but once in my 
 life. There had been a thaw without wind or 
 rain, making the air fat with gray vapor. Towards 
 sundown came that chill, the avant-courier of a 
 northwesterly gale. Then, though there was no 
 perceptible current in the atmosphere, the fog 
 began to attach itself in frosty roots and filaments 
 to the southern side of every twig and grass-stem. 
 The very posts had poems traced upon them by 
 this dumb minstrel. Wherever the moist seeds 
 found lodgment grew an inch-deep moss fine as 
 cob-web, a slender coral-reef, argentine, delicate, as 
 of some silent sea in the moon. 
 
 " Now look down from your hillside across the 
 valley. The trees are leafless, but this is the season 
 to study their anatomy, and did you ever notice 
 before how much color there is in the twigs of 
 
THE ATLANTIC — SECOND MARRIAGE. 
 
 127 
 
 many of them ? And the smoke from those chim- 
 neys is so blue it seems Uke a feeder of the sky 
 into which it flows. Winter refines it and gives 
 it agreeable associations. In summer it suggests 
 cookery or the drudgery of steam-engines, but now 
 your fancy (if it can forget for a moment the dreary 
 usurpation of stoves) traces it down to the fireside 
 and the brightened faces of children." 
 
CHAPTER X. 
 
 THE EIGLOW PAPERS. — SECOND SERIES. 
 
 TWENTY years elapsed between the publica- 
 tion of the first and second series of the 
 Biglow Papers. The Civil War had begun and 
 Birdofredum Sawin, who after his exploits in 
 Mexico had decided to join the Southerners, writes 
 a long epistle in rhyme to Hosea. " I invented 
 Mr. Sawin," says Lowell, " for the clown of my 
 little puppet-show. I meant to embody in him 
 that half-conscious unmorality which I had noticed 
 as the recoil in gross natures from a puritanism 
 that still strove to keep in its creed the intense 
 savor which had long gone out of its faith and 
 life. . . . Mr. Sawin's name sprang from the 
 accident of a rhyme at the end of his first epistle, 
 and I purposely christened him by the impossible 
 surname of Birdofredum not more to stigmatize 
 him as the incarnation of ' Manifest Destiny,' in 
 other words, of national recklessness as to right 
 and wrong, than to avoid the chance of wounding 
 any private sensitiveness. ... I needed on 
 
 128 
 
THE BIGLOW PAPERS. — SECOND SERIES. 
 
 129 
 
 occasion to rise above the level of mere patois, 
 and for this purpose conceived the Rev. Mr. 
 Wilbur, who should express the more cautious 
 element of the New England character and its 
 pedantry as Mr. Biglow should serve for its homely 
 common sense vivified and heated by conscience. 
 The parson was to be the complement rather than 
 the antithesis of his parishioner, and I felt, or 
 fancied, a certain humorous element in the real 
 identity of the two under a seeming incongruity. 
 Mr. Wilbur's fondness for scraps of Latin, though 
 drawn from the life, I adopted deliberately to 
 heighten the contrast. 
 
 " The success of my experiment," continues 
 Lowell, " soon began not only to astonish me, but 
 to make me feel the responsibility of knowing 
 that I held in my hand a weapon instead of the 
 mere fencing-stick I had supposed. ... I 
 found the verses of my pseudonyme copied every- 
 where ; I saw them pinned up in workshops ; I 
 heard them quoted and their authorship debated ; 
 I once even, when rumor had at length caught up 
 my name in one of its eddies, had the satisfaction 
 of overhearing it demonstrated, in the pauses of a 
 concert, that I was utterly incompetent to have 
 written anything of the kind. I had read too 
 much not to know the utter worthlessness of con- 
 
130 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 
 
 temporary reputation, especially as regards satire, 
 but I knew also that by giving a certain amount 
 of influence it also had its worth, if that influence 
 were used on the right side. I had learned, too, 
 that the first requisite of good writing is to have 
 an earnest and definite purpose, whether aesthetic 
 or moral, and that even good writing, to please 
 long, must have more than an average amount 
 either of imagination or common sense. The first 
 of these falls to the lot of scarcely one in several 
 generations ; the last is within the reach of many 
 in every one that passes ; and of this an author 
 may fairly hope to become in part the mouthpiece. 
 If I put on the cap and bells and made myself 
 one of the court fools of King Demos, it was less 
 to make his majesty laugh than to win a passage 
 to his royal ears for certain serious things which 
 I had deeply at heart. I say this because there 
 is no imputation that could be more galling to any 
 man's self-respect than that of being a mere 
 jester. I endeavored, by generalizing my satire, 
 to give it what value I could beyond the passing 
 moment and the immediate application." 
 
 Of the inimitable little ballad, " The Courtin'," 
 beginning — 
 
 " Zekel crep' up quite unbeknown 
 An' peeked in threu the winder," 
 
THE BIGLOW PAPERS.— SECOND SERIES. 131 
 
 Lowell says, " While the introduction to the First 
 Series of the Biglow Papers was going through 
 the press, I received word from the printer that 
 there was a blank page left which must be filled. I 
 sat down at once and improvised another fictitious 
 ' notice of the press,' in which, because verse 
 would fill up space more cheaply than prose, I 
 inserted an extract from a supposed ballad of Mr. 
 Biglow. I kept no copy of it, and the printer, as 
 directed, cut it off when the gap was filled. Pres- 
 ently I began to receive letters asking for the rest 
 of it, sometimes for the balance of it. I had none, 
 but to answer such demands, I patched a con- 
 clusion upon it in a later edition. Afterward, 
 being asked to write it out as an autograph for the 
 Baltimore Sanitary Commission Fair, I added other 
 verses, into some of which I infused a little more 
 sentiment in a homely way, and after a fashion 
 completed it by sketching in the characters and 
 making it a connected story." 
 
 In the original poem there were but six stanzas, 
 while in the completed sketch there are twenty- 
 four. 
 
 After an inside view of Secession given by 
 Birdofredum Sawin in this " Second Series of the 
 Biglow Papers," a burlesque message of Jefferson 
 Davis to the Confederate Congress follows, and the 
 
132 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 
 
 " Speech of Honourable Preserved Doe in Secret 
 Caucus." Then comes " Sunthin' in the Pastoral 
 Line," which the poet says he attempted in re- 
 membrance of the counsel of his friend, Arthur 
 Hugh Clough. " He often suggested," writes 
 Lowell, " that I should try my hand at some 
 Yankee Pastorals, which would admit of more 
 sentiment and a higher tone without foregoing 
 the advantage offered by the dialect. I have never 
 completed anything of the kind, but in this Second 
 Series of the Biglow Papers, both my remem- 
 brance of his counsel and the deeper feeling called 
 up by the great interests at stake, led me to vent- 
 ure some passages nearer to what is called poeti- 
 cal than could have been admitted without incon- 
 gruity into the former series." 
 
 A few quotations from Hosea's attempts in the 
 " Pastoral Line" will show the reader how well he 
 succeeded : — 
 
 " I, country-born an' bred, know where to find 
 Some blooms thet make the season suit the mind, 
 An' seem to metch the doubtin' blue-bird's notes, — 
 Half-vent'rin' liverworts in furry coats, 
 Bloodroots, whose rolled-up leaves e£ you oncurl. 
 Each on em's cradle to a baby-pearl, — 
 But these are jes' Spring's pickets ; sure ez sin, 
 The rebble frosts'll try to drive 'em in ; 
 For half our May's so awfully like Mayn't, 
 
THE BIGLOW PAPERS. — SECOND SERIES. 13 
 
 'T would rile a Shaker or an evrige saint ; 
 Though I own up I like our back'ard springs 
 Thet kind o' haggle with their greens an' things 
 An' when you 'most give up, 'ithout more words 
 Toss the fields full o' blossoms, leaves, an' birds : 
 Thet's Northun natur', slow an' apt to doubt, 
 But when it doos git stirred, ther' 's no gin-out ! 
 
 Young oak-leaves mist the side-hill woods with pink; 
 The catbird in the laylock-bush is loud ; 
 The orchards turn to heaps o' rosy cloud ; 
 Red-cedars blossom tu, though few folks know it, 
 An' look all dipt in sunshine like a poet ; 
 The lime-trees pile their solid stacks o' shade 
 An' drows'ly simmer with the bees' sweet trade ; 
 In ellum-shrouds the flashin' hangbird clings 
 An' for the summer vy'ge his hammock slings ; 
 
 'nuff sed, June's bridesman, poet o' the year. 
 
 Gladness on wings, the bobolink, is here ; 
 
 Half-hid in tip-top apple-blooms he swings. 
 
 Or climbs aginst the breeze with quiverin' wings, 
 
 Or, givin' way to 't in a mock despair 
 
 Runs down, a brook o' laughter, thru the air." 
 
 The death of good Parson Wilbur is announced 
 in the preface to the next poem, and the reader 
 feels he has lost a dear and honored friend. His 
 colleague and successor, Rev. Jeduthan Hitchcook, 
 edits his literary remains which are, however, 
 " so fragmentary and even chaotic, written as they 
 
134 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 
 
 are on the backs of letters in an exceedingly 
 cramped chirography, — here a memorandum for 
 a sermon ; there an observation of the weather ; 
 now the measurement of an extraordinary head of 
 cabbage, and then of the cerebral capacity of 
 some reverend brother deceased ; a calm inquiry 
 into the state of modern literature, ending in 
 a method of detecting if milk be impoverished 
 with water, etc., — that any attempts at selection 
 seemed desperate." 
 
 One quotation from the Parson's " Table Talk " 
 must not be omitted, because of its striking in- 
 dividuality as well as its great beauty : — 
 
 " I think I could go near to be a perfect Chris- 
 tian if I were always a visitor, as I have some- 
 times been, at the house of some hospitable friend. 
 I can show a great deal of self-denial where the 
 best of everything is urged upon me with kindly 
 importunity. It is not so very hard to turn the 
 other cheek for a kiss. And when I meditate 
 upon the pains taken for our entertainment in this 
 life, on the endless variety of seasons, of human 
 character and fortune, on the costliness of the 
 hangings and furniture of our dwelling here, I 
 sometimes feel a singular joy in looking upon 
 myself as God's guest, and cannot but believe that 
 we should all be wiser and happier, because more 
 
THE BIGLOW PAPERS.— SECOND SERIES. 135 
 
 grateful, if we were always mindful of our privi- 
 lege in this regard. And should we not rate more 
 cheaply any honor that men could pay us, if we 
 remember that every day we sat at the table of the 
 Great King ? Yet must we not forget that we 
 are in strictest bonds His servants also ; for there 
 is no impiety so abject as that which expects to 
 be dead-headed {ut ita dictum) through life, and 
 which calling itself trust in Providence, is in 
 reality asking Providence to trust us and taking 
 up all our goods on false pretences. It is a wise 
 rule to take the world as we find it, not always to 
 leave it so." 
 
 In the tenth poem of this Second Series, the 
 poet pays a tender tribute to his three young 
 nephews whose lives were lost in the Civil War : — 
 
 " Why, hain't I held 'em on my knee ? 
 
 Didn't I love to see 'em growin', 
 Three likely lads ez wal could be, 
 
 Hahnsome an' brave an' not tu knowin' ? 
 I set an' look into the blaze 
 
 Whose natur' jes' like theirn, keeps climbin' 
 Ez long 'z it lives, in shinin' ways, 
 
 An' half despise myself for rhymin'. 
 
 " Wut's words to them whose faith an' truth 
 On War's red techstone rang true metal. 
 Who ventered life an' love an' youth 
 For the gret prize o' death in battle ? 
 
136 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 
 
 To him who, deadly hurt, agen 
 
 Flashed on afore the charge's thunder, 
 
 Tippin' with fire the bolt of men 
 Thet rived the Rebel line asunder ? 
 
 " 'Tain't right to hev the young go fust, 
 
 All throbbin' full o' gifts an' graces, 
 Leavin' life's paupers dry ez dust 
 
 To try an' make b'lieve fill their places : 
 Nothin' but tells us wut we miss, 
 
 Ther' 's gaps our lives can't never fay in. 
 An' thet world seems so fur from this 
 
 Lef for us loafers to grow gray in I " 
 
 Hosea's " Speech in March Meeting " ends the 
 Second Series of the Biglow Papers which were 
 dedicated to the poet's friend, E. R. Hoar, and 
 published in book form by Ticknor and Fields, in 
 1867. Not long after, the two series were pub- 
 lished together, with a glossary and index and 
 various notes and comments. 
 
 A well-known English critic writes as follows 
 of the " Biglow Papers " : — 
 
 "Ardent, enthusiastic, eager to rehearse the 
 epic of a man, Lowell threw himself into the 
 stream of national life. The current was already 
 seething and foaming with the impulse of a mighty 
 movement. The application of science to indus- 
 trial enterprise changed the face of nature ; habits, 
 
THE BIGLOW PAPERS.— SECOND SERIES. 137 
 
 ideas, fashions of thought, altered with marvellous 
 rapidity ; population doubled and trebled itself ; 
 society underwent a transformation as complete as 
 it was sudden ; literature became a power. Every- 
 where was spreading the influence of Channing 
 and of Emerson, humanizing Religion and Nature, 
 protesting in the name of something higher 
 against the exclusive reign of the senses and the 
 understanding. Towards the same end contrib- 
 uted the genial culture and tender romance of 
 Longfellow. A movement so rapid and extensive 
 necessarily brought in its train vast social changes. 
 Strange hopes were in the air of an approaching 
 millennium : the sin of slavery must be purged 
 before its advent. Lowell threw himself heart 
 and soul, into the cause of the Abolitionists. His 
 fervor made him didactic, but its fiery impulse 
 when the preaching element subsided, gave his 
 verse a peculiar force. 
 
 " In the ' Biglow Papers ' his enthusiasm urged 
 him to a masterpiece which ranks with the great- 
 est political satires of classic or modern Europe, 
 and eift-olled Lowell among the successful humor 
 ists of the world. Parson Wilbur, with his sim- 
 plicity and vanity, his pedantry and wit, his solid 
 and varied learning, his combined capacity for 
 sermonizing and hard hitting, is an incomparable 
 
138 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 
 
 editor. Hosea's drily humorous picturesqueness, 
 strong common sense, effective and homely illus- 
 trations, and quaint Scriptural allusions, admirably 
 represent the New England character. The type 
 of provincial Yanked which Lowell depicts is now 
 nearly extinct. Competent judges appear to be 
 agreed that the dialect is reproduced with the ut- 
 most purity, and that as a specimen of the vernacu- 
 lar idiom the Biglow Papers are infinitely superior 
 to Sam Slick or Major Downing. Hosea Biglow 
 and Birdofredum Sawin are dramatic creations, 
 racy of the soil, yet intensely human, at once 
 American and universal. It is not in the New 
 World only that there are military braggarts, or 
 that ' pious editors ' or ' north-by-south candidates ' 
 endeavor to dodge the moral laws of the universe, 
 and steal a march on virtue without having their 
 retreat cut off. There is no ribaldry in the Scrip- 
 tural phrases ; they are not introduced as an ele- 
 ment in the ridiculous effect, but are the natural 
 expression of a simple people whose language and 
 modes of thought are saturated by Biblical feeling 
 and phrases. There is in the pungent satire*none 
 of the misanthropic ferocity of a Swift, nor the 
 irritated vanity of a Byron ; but beneath the bit- 
 ter hatred of slavery, the incisive sharpness of 
 the political denunciations, the withering scorn of 
 
THE BIGLOW PAPERS.— SECOND SERIES. 139 
 
 social faults, lies a fund* of genial humour and 
 the human sympathy. The purpose is grave and 
 serious, for it forms part of the writer's very ex- 
 istence ; yet the fun is apparently reckless. A 
 second glance shows that only a cool brain, steady 
 hand, and complete self-command, could apply the 
 lash with such unerring aim and sinewy strength 
 to the tenderest part of the adversary. The blows 
 fall quickly, unexpectedly, and never miss their 
 mark. They not only sting, but make their vic- 
 tims ludicrous. Lowell effected for the Abolition- 
 ist cause what a wilderness of homilists could not 
 achieve. He turned the laugh against the slave- 
 owners; the light shafts of ridicule penetrated 
 the toughest hides and could not be withdrawn. 
 The second series is inferior to the first in fresh- 
 ness and vigor. Yet there are lines in the tenth 
 letter of the series, which perhaps strike as high 
 a note of poetry as Lowell has ever reached. ' The 
 Biglow Papers ' form an invaluable commentary on 
 the history of the times. All the deep interests, 
 with which the twenty years that succeeded 1848 
 were throbbing, beat in that unique collection of 
 humorous and passionate verse. None the less 
 interesting are the Papers because they show the 
 mental changes through which Lowell passed. In 
 the first series he complains of the ascendency of 
 
140 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 
 
 the South in the councils of the States, and pre- 
 fers the severance of the Federal Union to its 
 continuance. In the second, he advocates the 
 assertion by force of arms of the physical suprem- 
 acy of the North. The light, airy tone, in which 
 the later series begins, shows that the war was 
 expected to be nothing but a summer picnic ; but 
 the tone grows grimmer as the death-grapple con- 
 tinued, till personal loss and the gloom and horror 
 of the gigantic struggle drew from the poet the 
 tenth letter of the series." 
 
CHAPTER XL 
 
 POEMS OF THE WAR AND "UNDER THE WILLOWS." 
 
 ON the twenty-first of July, 1865, Commemora- 
 tion services were held at Cambridge, and 
 that beautiful Ode was read by Lowell, " To the 
 ever sweet and shining memory of the ninety -three 
 sons of Harvard College who died for their country 
 in the war of nationality." Among this number 
 were eight of the poet's own kindred. The Ode 
 is one of marvellous beauty and power, and shows 
 a finer quality than the best of Dryden's. The 
 poet felt what he wrote, and the words thrilled 
 with the life-pulse that prompted them. Listen, 
 for instance, to this stirring passage : — 
 
 " Some day the soft Ideal that we wooed 
 Confronts us fiercely, foe-beset, pursued, 
 And cries reproachful : ' Was it, then, my praise, 
 And not myself was loved ? Prove now thy truth ; 
 I claim of thee the promise of thy youth ; 
 Give me thy life, or cower in empty phrase, 
 The victim of thy genius, not its mate I ' 
 Life may be given in many ways, 
 
 141 
 
142 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 
 
 And loyalty to Truth be sealed 
 As bravely in the closet as the field, 
 So bountiful is Fate ; 
 But then to stand beside her 
 When craven churls deride her, 
 To front a lie in arms and not to yield. 
 This shows, methinks, God's plan 
 And measure of a stalwart man, 
 Limbed like the old heroic breeds, 
 Who stands self-poised on manhood's solid earth. 
 Not forced to frame excuses for his birth. 
 Fed from within with all the strength he needs." 
 
 And what a fine tribute the poet pays to our 
 Martyred Chief : — 
 
 " Nature, they say, doth dote. 
 And cannot make a man 
 Save on some worn-out plan. 
 Repeating us by rote ; 
 For him her Old- World moulds aside she threw. 
 And, choosing sweet clay from the breast 
 Of the unexhausted West, 
 With stuff untainted shaped a hero new. 
 Wise, steadfast in the strength of God, and true. 
 
 Here was a type of the true elder race 
 And one of Plutarch's men talked with us face to face." 
 
 With touching pathos the poet continues : — 
 
 " We welcome back our bravest and our best ; — 
 . Ah me I not all I some come not with the rest, 
 
POEMS OF THE WAR. 14 
 
 Who went forth brave and bright as any here I 
 
 I strive to mix some gladness with my strain, 
 
 But the sad strings complain, 
 
 And will not please the ear : 
 
 I sweep them for a pasan, but they wane 
 
 Again and yet again 
 Into a dirge, and die away, in pain. 
 In these brave ranks I only see the gaps, 
 Thinking of dear ones whom the dumb turf wraps, 
 Dark to the triumph which they died to gain : 
 Fitlier may others greet the living, 
 For me the past is unforgiving ; 
 I with uncovered head 
 Salute the sacred dead, 
 Who went, and who returned not. — Say not so I 
 Tis not the grapes of Canaan that repay. 
 But the high faith that failed not by the way ; 
 Virtue treads paths that end not in the grave ; 
 No bar of endless night exiles the brave ; 
 
 And to the saner mind 
 We rather seem the dead that stayed behind." 
 
 The closing stanza rings out with the eloquence 
 of a true patriot as well as poet : — 
 
 " Bow down, dear Land, for thou hast found release I 
 Thy God, in these distempered days 
 Hath taught thee the sure wisdom of His ways. 
 
 And through thine enemies hath wrought thy peace I 
 Bow down in prayer and praise I 
 
 No poorest in thy borders but may now 
 
 Lift to the juster skies a man's enftanchised brow, 
 
144 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 
 
 O Beautiful I my Country 1 ours once more 1 
 Smoothing thy gold of war-dishevelled hair 
 O'er such sweet brows as never other wore, 
 
 And letting thy set lips, 
 
 Freed from wrath's pale eclipse. 
 The rosy edges of their smile lay bare, 
 What words divine of lover or of poet 
 Could tell our love and make thee know it. 
 Among the Nations bright beyond compare ? 
 
 What were our lives without thee ? 
 
 What all our lives to save thee ? 
 
 We reck not what we gave thee ; 
 
 We will not dare to doubt thee. 
 But ask whatever else, and we will dare 1 " 
 
 Among other " Poems of the War," written at 
 this time, was " The Washers of the Shroud," in 
 which the poet, "in mystery of dream" sees 
 
 " the ancient Three 
 Known to the Greek's and to the Northman's creed, 
 That sit in shadow of the mystic Tree, 
 Still crooning, as they weave their endless brede, 
 One song : ' Time was, Time is, and Time shall be.'" 
 
 The poet hstens to their fateful words : — 
 
 " What make we, murmur'st thou ? and what are we ? 
 When empires must be wound, we bring the shroud. 
 The time-old web of the implacable Three : 
 Is it too coarse for him, the young and proud ? 
 Earth's mightiest deigned to wear it, — why not he ? 
 
 " ' Rough are the steps, slow-hewn in flintiest rock. 
 States climb to power by ; slippery those with gold 
 
POEMS OF THE WAR. j^c 
 
 Down which they stumble to eternal mock : 
 No chafterer's hand shall long the sceptre hold 
 Who, given a Fate to shape, would sell the block. 
 
 " ' We sing old Sagas, songs of weal and woe, 
 Mystic because too cheaply understood j 
 Dark sayings are not ours ; men hear and know, 
 See Evil weak, see strength alone in Good, 
 Yet hope to stem God's fire with walls of tow. 
 
 " ' Time Was unlocks the riddle of Time Is, 
 That offers choice of glory or of gloom ; 
 The solver makes Time Shall Be surely his. 
 But hasten, Sisters I for even now the tomb 
 Grates its slow hinge, and calls from the abyss.' " 
 
 Then " with clenched hands and passionate pain," 
 the poet cries : — 
 
 " ' But not for him, not yet for him. 
 Whose large horizon, westering, star by star 
 Wins from the void to where on Ocean's rim 
 The sunset shuts the world with golden bar, 
 Not yet his thews shall fail, his eye grow dim I 
 
 " ' His shall be larger manhood, saved for those 
 That walk unblenching through the trial-fires ; 
 Not suffering, but faint heart, is worst of woes, 
 And he no base-born son of craven sires, 
 Whose eye need blench confronted with his foes.'" 
 
 These few stanzas from the poem will serve to 
 give the reader an idea of its scope and beauty, 
 but to be fully appreciated it must be read entire. 
 
146 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 
 
 " Memorise Positum " is a beautiful tribute to 
 the heroic Colonel Robert G. Shaw who fell in the 
 assault upon Fort Wagner : — 
 
 " Brave, good, and true, 
 I see him stand before me now, 
 And read again on that young brow, 
 Where every hope was new, 
 Lfma sweet were life I Yet, by the mouth firm-set, 
 And look made up for Duty's utmost debt, 
 
 I could divine he knew 
 That death within the sulphrous hostile lines, 
 In the mere wreck of nobly-pitched designs, 
 Pluck's heart's-ease, and not rue. 
 • ••■•>•■••• 
 
 " Right in the van. 
 On the red rampart's slippery swell. 
 With heart that beat a charge, he fell 
 Forward, as fits a man ; 
 But the high soul burns on to light men's feet 
 Where death for noble ends makes dying sweet j 
 
 His life her crescent's span 
 Orbs full with share in their undarkening days 
 Who ever climbed the battailous steeps of praise 
 Since valor's praise began." 
 
 The whole poem is full of patriotism and a certain 
 sympathetic pathos which reaches its climax in 
 the closing stanza : — 
 
 " I write of one 
 While with dim eyes I think of three ; 
 Who weeps not others fair and brave as he ? 
 
POEMS OF THE WAR. 14^ 
 
 Ah, when the fight is won, 
 Dear Land, whom triflers now make bold to scorn, 
 (Thee ! from whose forehead Earth awaits her morn,) 
 
 How nobler shall the sun 
 Flame in thy sky, how braver breathe thy air. 
 That thou bred'st children who for thee could dare 
 
 And die as thine have done I " 
 
 The lines written for the poet Bryant's seven- 
 tieth birthday may well be included among the 
 War Poems, for it was written "On Board the 
 76": — 
 
 " Our ship lay tumbling in an angry sea. 
 
 Her rudder gone, her mainmast o'er the side ; 
 
 Her scuppars, from the waves' clutch staggering free 
 Trailed threads of priceless crimson through the tide ; 
 
 Sails, shrouds, and spars with pirate cannon torn. 
 We lay, awaiting morn. 
 
 " I leaned against my gun still angry-hot, 
 And my lids tingled with the tears held back; 
 
 This scorn methought was crueller than shot : 
 The manly death grip in the battle-wrack. 
 
 Yard-arm to yard-arm were more friendly far 
 Than such fear-smothered war.'' 
 
 The poet, mourning the want of fealty where it 
 was most to be expected, turns with admiring 
 gaze to — ■ 
 
148 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 
 
 . . . " one, the Singer of our crew, 
 Upon whose head Age waved his peaceful sign,- 
 But whose red heart's-blood no surrender knew ; 
 
 And couchant under brows of massive line, 
 The eyes, like guns beneath a parapet. 
 
 Watched, charged with lightnings yet. 
 
 " The voices of the hills did his obey ; 
 
 The torrents flashed and tumbled in his song; 
 He brought our native fields from far away. 
 
 Or set us mid the innumerable throng 
 Of dateless woods, or where we heard the calm 
 Old homestead's evening psalm. 
 
 " But now he sang of faith to things unseen, 
 Of freedom's birthright given to us in trust ; 
 
 And words of doughty cheer he spoke between. 
 That made all earthly fortune seem as^ust, 
 
 Matched with that duty, old as Time and new. 
 Of being brave and true.'' 
 
 And what finer tribute could one war-poet pay 
 to another than the following : — 
 
 "In our dark hours he manned our guns again; 
 
 Remanned ourselves from his own manhood's stores ; 
 Pride, honor, country throbbed through all his strain ; 
 
 And shall we praise ? God's praise was his before ; 
 And on our futile laurels he looks down. 
 Himself our bravest crown I " 
 
 These " Poems of the War " were published, 
 with the long poem "Under the Willows," and 
 other miscellaneous poems, in 1869, by Fields, 
 
POEMS OF THE WAR. 145 
 
 Osgood & Co. The volume was dedicated in verse 
 to Charles Eliot Norton, and the prefatory note 
 reads as follows : — 
 
 " No collection of the author's poems has been 
 made since 1848, and some of those in this volume 
 date back even farther than that. All but two of 
 the shortest have been printed before, either wholly 
 or in part. . . . 
 
 " A few pieces, more strictly comic, have been 
 omitted as out of keeping ; and, ' Fitz Adams' 
 Story ' which some good friends will miss, is also 
 left to stand over, because it belongs to a connected 
 series, which it is hoped may be completed if the 
 days should be propitious." 
 
 This " Story of Fitz Adams' " first appeared in 
 The Atlantic Monthly for January, 1867. It re- 
 minds one strongly of the Biglow Papers, although 
 the Yankee dialect is only occasionally inter- 
 spersed. The scene is laid in Shebagog County, 
 and the landlord of the rustic inn is painted as 
 carefully as one of Chaucer's portraits. Indeed 
 the whole story might well be called a modern 
 " Canterbury Tale." The author intended it as 
 part of a longer poem to be called "The Nooning," 
 but the original plan has never been carried out. 
 
 " Under the Willows " is a poem full of out- 
 door delights, and surely — 
 
150 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 
 
 . . ." to bask and ripen is sometimes 
 Tlie student's wiser business ; the brain 
 Tliat forages all climes to line its cells, 
 Ranging both worlds on lighest wings of wish, 
 Will not distil the juices it has sucked 
 To the sweet substance of pellucid thought, 
 Except for him who hath the secret learned 
 To mix his blood with sunshine, and to take 
 The winds into his pulses." 
 
 Beneath the "willow tent," the poet sees a 
 glorious picture : — 
 
 . . . " the sliding Charles, 
 Blue toward the west, and bluer and more blue. 
 Living and lustrous as a woman's eyes 
 Look once and look no more, with southward curve 
 Ran crinkling sunniness, like Helen's hair 
 Glimpsed in Elysium, insubstantial gold; 
 From blossom-clouded orchards, far away 
 The bobolink tinkled ; the deep meadows flowed 
 With multitudinous pulse of light and shade 
 Against the bases of the southern hills, 
 While here and there a drowsy island rick 
 Slept and its shadow slept ; the wooden bridge 
 Thundered, and then was silent ; on the roofs 
 The sun-warped shingles rippled with the heat; 
 Summer on field and hill, in heart and brain, 
 All life washed clean in this high tide of June." 
 
 From his boyhood these old willows had been 
 an inspiration to the poet. One, he says, — 
 
iSi 
 
 POEMS OF THE WAR. 
 
 . . . " is as old to me as life ; 
 And under it full often have I stretched, 
 Feeling the warm earth like a thing alive, 
 And gathering virtue in at every pore 
 Till it possessed me wholly, and thought ceased, 
 Or was transfused in something to which thought 
 Is coarse and dull of sense. Myself was lost, 
 Gone from me like an ache, and what remained 
 Became a part of the universal joy. 
 My soul went forth, and, mingling with the tree 
 Danced in the leaves ; or, floating in the cloud, 
 Saw its white double in the stream below ; 
 Or else, sublimed to purer ecstasy. 
 Dilated in the broad blue over all. 
 I was the wind that dappled the lush grass, 
 The tide that crept with coolness to its roots. 
 The thin-winged swallow skating on the air ; 
 The life that gladdened everything was mine." 
 
 The willows, however, have other visitors : — 
 
 " Here, sometimes, in this paradise of shade. 
 Rippled with western winds, the dusty Tramp, 
 Seeing the treeless causey burn beyond, 
 Halts to unroll his bundle of strange food 
 And munch an unearned meal." 
 
 Here, too : — 
 
 " The Scissors-grinder, pausing, doffs his hat, 
 And lets the kind breeze, with its delicate fan. 
 Winnow the heat from out his dank gray hair, — 
 A grimy Ulysses, a much-wandered man," — 
 
152 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 
 
 The poet, quick to learn from all, entraps the 
 latter ''with a long-suffering knife": — 
 
 " And, while its poor blade hums away in sparks, 
 Sharpen my wit upon his gritty mind, 
 In motion set obsequious to his wheel. 
 And in its quality not much unlike. 
 
 " Nor wants my tree more punctual visitors. 
 The children, they who are the only rich, 
 Creating for the moment, and possessing 
 Whate'er they choose to feign, — for still with them 
 Kind Fancy plays the fairy godmother, 
 
 " Here, too, the men that mend our village ways. 
 Vexing McAdam's ghost with pounded slate. 
 Their noonin' take ; " — 
 
 And our poet with — 
 
 . . . " observant eye 
 Will find mankind in little, as the stars 
 Glide up and set, and all the heavens revolve 
 In the small welkin of a drop of dew. 
 
 O, benediction of the higher mood 
 And human-kindness of the lower I for both 
 I will be grateful while I live, nor question 
 The wisdom that hath made us what we are." 
 
 These brief extracts give but a suggestion of 
 the beauty and strength of the poem, as a whole. 
 
POEMS OF THE WAR. 
 
 153 
 
 To fully appreciate " Under the Willows " it must 
 be read entire, and if possible out of doors, on a 
 day when " June is full of invitations sweet " ; 
 and, — 
 
 " With one great gush of blossom storms the world I " 
 
 The dedication of " Under the Willows " to 
 Charles Eliot Norton, is in verse, and in the poet's 
 best vein. Here are a few of the lines : — 
 
 "The wind is roistering out of doors, 
 My windows shake and my chimney roars ; 
 My Elmwood chimneys seem crooning to me. 
 As of old, in their moody, minor key, 
 And out of the past the hoarse wind blows, 
 As I sit in my arm-chair, and toast my toes. 
 
 " ' Ho I ho ! nine-and-forty ! ' they seem to sing, 
 ' We saw you a little toddling thing. 
 We knew you child and youth arid man, 
 A wonderful fellow to dream and plan, 
 With a great thing always to come, — who knows? 
 Well, well ! 'tis some comfort to toast one's toes. 
 
 " I sit and dream that I hear, as of yore. 
 My Elmwood chimneys' deep-throated roar ; 
 If much be gone, there is much remains ; 
 By the embers of loss I count my gains. 
 You and yours with the best, till the old hope glows 
 In the fanciful flame, as I toast my toes. 
 
154 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 
 
 " Instead of a fleet of broad-browed ships, 
 To send a child's armada of chips I 
 Instead of the great guns, tier on tier 
 A freight of pebbles and grass-blades sere I 
 ' Well, maybe more love with the less gift goes,' 
 I growl, as, half moody, I toast my toes." 
 
CHAPTER XII. 
 
 THE CATHEDRAL. — LOWELl's RELIGIOUS FAITH. — 
 PROSE WRITINGS. 
 
 IN Lowell's next long poem, " The Cathedral," 
 we have a beautiful exposition of the poet's 
 religious faith : — 
 
 " I, that still pray at morning and at eve, 
 Loving those roots that feed us from the past, 
 And prizing more than Plato things I learned 
 At that best academe, a mother's knee, 
 Thrice in my life perhaps have truly prayed. 
 Thrice, stirred below my conscious self, have felt 
 That perfect disenthralment which is God ; 
 Nor know I which to hold worst enemy, — 
 Him who on speculation's windy waste 
 Would turn me loose, stript of the raiment warm 
 By Faith contrived against our nakedness. 
 Or him who, cruel-kind, would fain obscure, 
 With painted saints and paraphrase of God, 
 The soul's east window of divine surprise." 
 
 " Science was Faith once ; Faith were Science now, 
 Would she but lay her bow and arrows by 
 And arm her with the weapons of the time. 
 
 I5S 
 
156 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 
 
 Nothing that keeps thought out is safe from thought. 
 For there's no virgin-fort but self-respect, 
 And Truth defensive hath lost hold on God. 
 Shall we treat Him as if He were a child 
 That knew not His own purpose ? nor dare trust 
 The Rock of Ages to their chemic tests, 
 Lest some day the all-sustaining base divine 
 Should fail from under us, dissolved in gas? 
 
 " Man cannot be God's outlaw if he would, 
 Nor so abscond him in the caves of sense 
 But Nature still shall search some crevice out 
 With messages of splendor from that Source 
 Which, dive he, soar he, baffles still and lures. 
 This life were brutish did we not sometimes 
 Have intimations clear of wider scope. 
 Hints of occasion infinite, to keep 
 The soul alert with noble discontent 
 And onward yearnings of unstilled desire ; 
 Fruitless, except we now and then divined 
 A mystery of Purpose, gleaming through 
 The secular confusions of the world. 
 Whose will we darkly accomplish, doing ours. 
 No man can think nor in himself perceive. 
 Sometimes at waking, in the street sometimes, 
 Or on the hillside, always unforewarned, 
 A grace of being, finer than himself. 
 That beckons and is gone, — a larger life 
 Upon his own impinging, with swift glimjpse 
 Of spacious circles luminous with mind. 
 To which the ethereal substance of his own 
 Seems but gross cloud to make that visible, 
 Touched to a sudden glory round the edge." 
 
LOWELVS RELIGIOUS FAITH. 
 
 IS7 
 
 It is the Cathedral at Chartres that Lowell 
 pictures in his poem : — 
 
 " Silent and gray as forest-leaguered cliff 
 Left inland by the ocean's slow retreat, 
 That hears afar the breeze-borne rote, and longs, 
 Remembering shocks of surf that clomb and fell, 
 Spume-sliding down the baffled decuman, 
 It rose before me, patiently remote 
 From the great tides of life it breasted once. 
 Hearing the noise of men as in a dream. 
 I stood before the triple northern port. 
 Where dedicated shapes of saints and kings. 
 Stern faces bleared with immemorial watch, 
 Looked down benignly grave and seemed to say. 
 Ye come and go incessant ; we remain 
 Safe in the hallowed quiets of the past; 
 Be reverent, ye who flit and are forgot. 
 Of faith so nobly realized as this ! " 
 
 The keynote of the whole poem is given in the 
 quotation from Euripides, on the title page : — 
 
 " Not at all do we set our wits against the gods. 
 The traditions of the fathers, and those of equal 
 date which we possess, no reasoning shall over- 
 throw ; not even if through lofty minds it dis- 
 covers wisdom." 
 
 This, surely, is the best form of conservatism, 
 and — 
 
 . . . "if his Church be doubtful, it is sure 
 That, in a world, made for whatever else, 
 
158 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 
 
 Not made for mere enjoyment, in a world 
 
 Of toil but half-requited, or, at best, 
 
 Paid in some futile currency of breath, 
 
 A world of incompleteness, sorrow swift 
 
 And consolation laggard, whatsoe'er 
 
 The form of building or the creed professed, 
 
 The Cross, bold type of shame to homage turned 
 
 Of an unfinished life that sways the world, 
 
 Shall tower as sovereign emblem over all." 
 
 The poet's beautiful, child-like faith in a Divine 
 Providence is grandly expressed in the closing 
 stanza : — 
 
 " O Power, more near my life than life itself 
 (Or what seems life to us in sense immured), 
 Even as the roots, shut in the darksome earth, 
 Share in the tree-top's joyance, and conceive 
 Of sunshine and wide air and winged things 
 By sympathy of nature, so do I 
 Have evidence of Thee so far above, 
 Yet in and of me I Rather Thou the root 
 Invisibly sustaining, hid in light. 
 Not darkness, or in darkness made by us. 
 If sometimes I must hear good men debate 
 Of other witness of Thyself than Thou, 
 As if there needed any help of ours 
 To nurse Thy flickering life, that else must cease, 
 Blown out, as 'twere a candle, by men's breath. 
 My soul shall not be taken in their snare. 
 To change her inward surety for their doubt 
 Muffled from sight in formal robes of proof ; 
 
LOWELL'S RELIGIOUS FAITH.. 159 
 
 While she can only feel herself through Thee, 
 I fear not Thy withdrawal ; more I fear 
 Seeing, to know Thee not, hoodwinked with dreams 
 Of signs and wonders, while, unnoticed, Thou 
 Walking Thy garden still, commun'st with men, 
 Missed in the commonplace of miracle." 
 
 But it is not only in "The Cathedral " that we 
 find an expression of the poet's deep religious 
 nature. In many of his shorter poems we find 
 the same beautiful trust in God, and a love for 
 man that is above all creeds : — 
 
 " Rabbi Jehosha had the skill 
 To know that heaven is in God's will. 
 
 " 'Twere glorious, no doubt, to be 
 One of the strong- winged Hierarchy, 
 To burn with Seraphs, or to shine 
 With Cherubs, deathlessly divine; 
 Yet I perhaps, poor earthly clod, 
 Could I forget myself in God, 
 Could I but find my nature's clew 
 Simply as birds and blossoms do. 
 And but for one rapt nioment know 
 'Tis heaven must come, not we must go, 
 Should win my place as near the throne 
 As the pearl-angel of its zone. 
 And God would listen 'mid the throng 
 For my one breath of perfect song, 
 That in its simple human way. 
 Said all the Host of Heaven could say." 
 
l6o JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 
 
 In one of his earlier poems, " The Search," the 
 poet, after seeking for Christ in Nature, in the 
 proud World, at dear Love's feet, finds — 
 
 . . . " in a hovel rude. 
 With naught to fence the weather from his head," 
 
 the King he sought. 
 
 " A naked hungry child 
 
 Clung round his gracious knee, 
 And a poor hunted slave looked up and smiled 
 
 To bless the smile that set him free ; 
 New miracles I saw his presence do, — 
 
 No more I knew the hovel bare and poor, 
 The gathered chips into a woodpile grew, 
 
 The broken morsel swelled to goodly store ; 
 I knelt and wept : my Christ no more I seek, 
 His throne is with the outcast and the weak.'' 
 
 Again in " Godminster Chimes " the same broad 
 charity is expressed : — 
 
 " Through aisles of long-drawn centuries 
 
 My spirit walks in thought, 
 And to that symbol lifts its eyes 
 
 Which God's own pity wrought; 
 From Calvary shines the altar's gleam. 
 
 The Church's East is there, 
 The Ages one great minster seem. 
 
 That throbs with praise and prayer. 
 
LOWELL'S RELIGIOUS FAITH. i6i 
 
 " And all the way from Calvary down 
 
 The carven pavement shows 
 Their graves who won the martyr's crown, 
 
 And safe in God repose ; 
 The saints of many a warring creed 
 
 Who now in heaven have learned 
 That all paths to the Father lead 
 
 Where Self the feet have spurned. 
 
 " O chime of sweet Saint Charity, 
 
 Peal soon that Easter morn 
 When Christ for all shall risen be, 
 
 And in all hearts new-born ! 
 That Pentecost when utterance clear 
 
 To all men shall be given. 
 When all shall say My Brother here, 
 
 And hear My Son in heaven ! " 
 
 In " The Foot-Path," the poet protests against 
 all form of Science that would make a " twice- 
 told tale of God " ; and once in a conversation 
 upon the " promise-and-potency " phrases of Tyn- 
 dall, he exclaimed with fervor : " Let whoever 
 wishes to, believe that the idea of Hamlet or Lear 
 was developed from a clod ; I will not." 
 
 Lowell's prose works consist, first, of a little 
 book published as early as 1845, upon "Conversa- 
 tions on Some of the Old Poets." No table of 
 contents is given, but the three conversations are 
 upon Chaucer, Chapman and Ford. In 1854, a 
 
i62 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 
 
 " Life of Keats " accompanied an edition of his 
 Poems, and was published by Little, Brown & Co. 
 
 " Fireside Travels," published in 1864, is a book, 
 of charming essays, some of which had already 
 appeared in Putnam's Monthly and other magazines 
 of the day. " Cambridge Thirty Years Ago " ; "A 
 Moosehead Journal"; "At Sea" ; "In the Mediter- 
 ranean " ; " Italy " ; and " A Few Bits of Roman 
 Mosaic " make up the table of contents. This 
 volume has since been reprinted by Houghton, 
 Mifflin & Co. in the " Riverside Aldine Series." 
 
 In No. 31 of " Modern Classics," "A Moosehead 
 Journal " may also be found. 
 
 Two volumes, "Among my Books," give de- 
 scriptive and critical essays upon various literary 
 subjects. The first series, published in 1870, con- 
 tains six thoughtfully-written articles upon Dryden ; 
 Witchcraft ; Shakespeare ; Lessing ; New England 
 Two Centuries Ago ; Rousseau and the Sentimen- 
 talists. The essays in the Second Series, published 
 six years later, are upon Dante ; Spenser ; Words- 
 worth ; Milton, and Keats. 
 
 "My Study ^Vv^indows," published in 1870, con- 
 tains some of the nfest of Lowell's prose writings. 
 From the first of. these, "My Garden Acquaint- 
 ance," vfeJia^^ already given quotations, and also 
 Jxv{!f"A Good Word for Winter." The other 
 
LOWELL'S RELIGIOUS FAITH. 163 
 
 essays in this volume are upon " A Great Pub^ 
 lie Character " (Hon. Josiah Quincy) ; Carlyle ; 
 Abraham Lincoln ; " The Life and Letters of James 
 Gates Percival " ; Thoreau ; Swinburne's Trage- 
 dies ; Chaucer ; " Library of Old Authors " ; " Em- 
 erson the Lecturer " ; and Pope. 
 
 Says an appreciative critic : — 
 
 " In his prose, as in his verse, Lowell is, in the 
 best sense of the much-abused word, 'original.' 
 But his originality is neither a trick of speech nor 
 an affectation of novelty. It is rather the gift of 
 seeing things with his own eyes, and expressing 
 precisely what he sees. Conservative and radical 
 at once, he prizes the oldest fact, but questions 
 the most venerable tradition. Whatever he writes 
 carries with it the unmistakable flavor of individ- 
 uality, and straightway betrays its authorship. 
 The seeds may be traced to a thousand sources, 
 but the fruit is native to the soil. Not merely the 
 words, but the whole cast and color of the thought 
 are thoroughly his own. Yet, on the other hand, 
 no modern writer suggests so often or so strongly 
 the earlier masters of our tongue, or seems to have 
 drunk so deeply at the wells of English undeiiled. 
 Passages in his essays recall, not by servile imita- 
 tion, but by natural kinship, the judicious Hooker, 
 the learned Bacon, and the exuberant fertility of 
 
l64 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 
 
 Jeremy Taylor. More fitly than Charles Lamb, 
 whose delicacy re-appears in the descriptions of 
 the cuckoo and the red squirrel, Lowell might be 
 called the last of the Elizabethans, for he enriches 
 his pages after the older manner with a wealth of 
 allusion drawn from the store-house of learning and 
 experience. But the title should be understood of 
 kinship alone, for Lowell is not an anachronism in 
 any sense, and declines to forget the present or 
 discount the future in idle adoration of the past. 
 
 " The singular felicity with which Lowell chooses 
 his words has often been noted, and has been pro- 
 nounced instinctive. The breadth of his vocabulary 
 is not less remarkable, and both must be explained 
 together. A native gift of discrimination cannot 
 be denied, but patient effort has had its share also 
 in the large result. Until reading and writing 
 come by nature, the native gift cannot be invoked 
 as the sole cause for differences in song or speech. 
 His earliest volume in prose, ' Conversations on 
 Some of the Older Poets,' reveals already his 
 close and sympathetic study of our older literature. 
 The prefaces to the ' Biglow Papers ' disclose a 
 specialist's patience and care in tracing out through 
 older English dialects the pedigree of our vernacular 
 words and idioms. Minute research and mastery 
 of details may repel the dilettante and enslave the 
 
LOWELVS RELIGIOUS FAITH. 
 
 l6S 
 
 pedant, but to him who can command them for 
 higher purposes, they minister as handmaids to 
 native genius. And out of this study of our Eng- 
 lish tongue, in its literature and in its dialectic 
 forms, Lowell has gathered strength, richness, 
 variety, and appositeness, the qualities that mark 
 his style in verse and prose." 
 
 To these Volumes of Prose Essays, Lowell has 
 recently added another entitled, " Democracy and 
 Other Addresses."- 
 
CHAPTER XIII. 
 
 DIPLOMATIC SERVICE ABROAD. 
 
 IN 1877 Lowell received from President Hayes 
 the appointment of Minister of the United 
 States to Spain. Three years later he was trans- 
 ferred by the same executive to England. Refer- 
 ring to his diplomatic service here, Rev. A. P. 
 Peabody says : — 
 
 " I am not unmindful that the mission to Eng- 
 land — but in a single instance dishonored — 
 has been repeatedly honored in the persons of 
 eminent, even preeminent men ! Least of all can 
 I forget that to the unparalleled wisdom, discretion, 
 disinterested patriotism of Charles Francis Adams 
 as our Minister our country owes, it may be, her 
 unmaime'd life ; for statesmanship less able, vigi- 
 lant, and unselfish than his could not have pre- 
 cluded the recognition by Great Britain of the 
 rebel confederacy, with its not improbable issue 
 in the dissolution of the Union. But without pre- 
 judice to honored memories, it may be said with 
 confidence that no man has represented or could 
 
DIPLOMATIC SERVICE ABROAD. 167 
 
 represent so many sides and aspects of American 
 life and so favorably as Mr. Lowell, and that to 
 him more largely than to any other man — ^we 
 might almost say, to all other men — we are in- 
 debted for the just appreciation of our claims on 
 the friendly regard and intimate fellow-feeling of 
 the mother country." 
 
 "James Russell Lowell," writes Charles F. Rich- 
 ardson, " represents American culture at its best, 
 and has proved to Englishmen that it may be as 
 broad and fine as European culture. In him have 
 been fitly shown the possible attainments of the 
 English people in its ' third home ' — to borrow Dr. 
 Freeman's phrase ; and he has embodied abroad, 
 to our immediate and lasting credit, the culture of 
 that land which has produced the imagination and 
 the style of Emerson, and the genius of Longfellow 
 — all three his friends. He has well borne his 
 message from the banks of the Charles and the 
 Androscoggin." 
 
 Of his personal appearance, while he was min- 
 ister to England, a correspondent to the London 
 " World " writes, on visiting him : — 
 
 " Seated in an easy chair, reading, is a light, spare 
 man with a profusion of curling hair and as luxuri- 
 ant beard which is almost white. His manner as 
 he rises to greet you is singularly quiet and unaf- 
 
1 68 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 
 
 fected. He reminds you of nothing so much as 
 the beautiful Indian summer of his native land, 
 differing only from mid-summer in the circum- 
 stance that the subdued tints of the foliage and 
 the still dreamy air tell you instinctively that 
 they are the heralds of coming winter. He turns 
 toward you his full, deep, gray eyes, at once 
 thoughtful and penetrating, and seems more in- 
 clined to listen than to talk. The conversation 
 drifts from one subject to another, and it is only 
 when some chord which interests him is struck 
 that you catch a momentary glimpse of the varied 
 knowledge, the rich cultivation, the genius and 
 power which have made for him so great a name 
 on both sides of the Atlantic." 
 
 One who saw him at Chelsea, says that "though 
 beginning to speak of himself as old, his white 
 beard is almost the outward and only visible sign 
 of age." And the same writer adds : "For all his 
 elegant gentlemanhood, he has lived intensely in 
 personal, patriotic, humanitarian, and, may it not 
 be added, religious sympathies .?" 
 
 The editor of the " Literary World " compares 
 Lowell's diplomatic service with that of Bancroft's, 
 as follows : — 
 
 " However the scales of ultimate opinion may 
 turn, Lowell undoubtedly stands before us, since 
 
DIPLOMATIC SERVICE ABROAD. 169 
 
 the death of Emerson and Longfellow, as our fore- 
 most man of letters ; the only one who can prop- 
 erly be said to contest the claim being the veteran 
 George Bancroft, who by a curious coincidence 
 wears, like Lowell, the double laurels of diplomacy 
 and letters. Bancroft, indeed, surpassed Lowell 
 in diplomacy — being far more severely tested — 
 as distinctly as Lowell surpasses him in imagina- 
 tion and in wit; but his career attracted less at- 
 tention, inasmuch as Berlin was much farther off 
 than London, and its gossip was less active and 
 pervasive, so that Americans hear less of what was 
 done. 
 
 " Yet Mr. Bancroft's influence, like that of Mr. 
 Lowell, was largely social, and he accomplished in 
 that sphere one triumph more conspicuous in 
 character and more truly American in tone than 
 any single feat of Mr. Lowell's, since he first, in 
 his own receptions, broke down the barrier that 
 had hitherto parted the aristocratic and the learned 
 classes of Germans. On the other hand, the 
 social triumphs of Mr. Lowell occurred in what is 
 perhaps the most highly organized and well-fenced 
 society in the whole world — that of London. 
 
 " It is not strange that in a society like this a 
 sphere opened itself for the original and well- 
 trained wit of Mr. Lowell — a preeminently Amer- 
 
170 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 
 
 ican wit, which travels several seconds quicker 
 per mile, so to speak, than the corresponding 
 grade of English talent. Add to this the cosmo- 
 politan training that had come by long residence 
 in France, Italy, and Germany ; with a knowledge 
 of English literature rarely equalled on either side 
 the Atlantic ; add also a facility of public speech 
 such as is not here so remarkable, perhaps, but is 
 to be heard in London only from Americans, 
 Irishmen, Lord Rosebery, and Cardinal Manning, 
 and it is plain that Mr. Lowell's success was 
 a foregone conclusion. With what were, until 
 within a few years, the two ruling classes of Eng- 
 land — the hereditary aristocracy and the literary 
 class — Mr. Lowell's popularity went as far as it 
 could go." 
 
 MosejCoit Tyler pays to Lowell the diploma- 
 tist, a fine tribute when he calls him a "bridge- 
 builder between the two countries " : — 
 
 " Both in England and in America, one meets 
 people who, in their dread of the ocean, are accus- 
 tomed to say that they are deferring the Atlantic 
 trip till they can make it over a bridge. Well, let 
 them have courage. Between these two lands 
 now, I am sure a bridge is building at last — not 
 of stone or iron or even of gold, but of better 
 acquaintance, of honest respect, of solid love, the 
 
DIPLOMATIC SERVICE ABROAD. 
 
 171 
 
 vast, immutable piers of it resting on an instinct 
 of proud and splendid kinship. Perhaps that 
 bridge may not be finished in our day. Such 
 structures take time. But at any rate, it is actu- 
 ally begun. It will be finished ; and, as I believe, 
 long generations of brethren and faithful friends 
 will pass and re-pass upon it ; and all mankind will 
 be the happier for its existence. For my part, 
 however, I doubt if any one has yet done more to 
 lay the piers of that goodly structure, or to shape 
 the curve of its indestructible arches than Lowell 
 the diplomatist, who, with gifts and powers not 
 conferred by his letters of instruction, so bore 
 himself in his foreign mission as to make that 
 mission no longer to us a foreign one. Indeed, 
 who so well as Lowell has helped to fulfill the 
 imperious prediction of his own ' Moniment ' : 
 
 " ' She an' Columby's gut to be fas' friends." 
 
 But it was not only as a diplomatist that Eng- 
 land received our accomplished minister : — 
 
 " Essayist, poet, satirist, critic, lecturer, profes- 
 sor, diplomatist, man of the world, of letters, and 
 of affairs, Lowell is, as Mr. Stedman says, the 
 representative of American literature. In him 
 are combined the ripe scholarship and varied 
 
172 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 
 
 learning of Parson Wilbur, with the shrewd moth- 
 er-wit and sound common sense of Hosea Biglow. 
 He sums up the best qualities of the refined and 
 cultured Americans. He has outlived the Van- 
 dalism and illiberal fanaticism of the Puritans, 
 and yet retains the religious resolve and fighting 
 spirit which at Naseby swept the chaff from the 
 threshing-floor of the Lord." 
 
 So writes an English critic in the Quarterly 
 Review, and adds therewith the following eulo- 
 giums upon the poems of Lowell : — 
 
 " From the very first his poetry was marked by 
 an ambitious purpose and a high ideal of his art. 
 Love was indeed the inspiration of 'A Year's 
 Life,' which he published in 1841, with the motto 
 from Schiller, 'Ich habe gelebt und geliebet.' But 
 this youthful volume was followed in 1844 by 
 poems in which the tender notes are blended with 
 sturdier tones. Already he raises his voice to 
 plead for freedom or dignify the heritage of the 
 poor. He was determined to be — 
 
 " ' . . . no empty rhymer 
 Who lies with idle elbow on the grass, 
 And fits his singing, like a cunning timer. 
 To all men's pride and fancies as they pass.' 
 
 "A similar strain appears in the following lines : — 
 
DIPLOMATIC SERVICE ABROAD. 173 
 
 " ' Never did poesy appear 
 So full of heaven to me, as when 
 I saw how it would pierce through pride and fear 
 To the lives of common men.' 
 
 " Or again, in the words which he puts in the 
 mouth of Hosea Biglow : — 
 
 " ' Ef I a song or two could make, 
 Like rockets druv by their own burnin,' 
 
 All leap an' light, to leave a wake 
 Men's hearts an' faces skyward turnin'.' 
 
 " His theory of the choice of themes also impelled 
 him to active life. He held that the Muse never 
 reveals herself to the man who pursues her with 
 prying eyes and panting breath, but seeks out for 
 herself the favored lovers, in whose ears she 
 whispers subjects which, as Lowell writes — 
 
 " ' By day or night won't let me be. 
 And hang about me like a curse, 
 Till they have made me into verse. ' 
 
 " With this aim and ideal before him, his poetry 
 has always been characterized by manly earnest- 
 ness and strong religious feeling. He aspires not 
 to conceive exquisite creations of the fancy which 
 might charm the dilettante, but to speak the 
 
174 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 
 
 simple words that waken their free nature in the 
 poor and friendless. 
 
 " His descriptive poetry reaches a high standard 
 of excellence. Nothing better of its kind has 
 been produced in America. His touches are bold 
 and sharp, his outlines never blurred; the vision 
 is reproduced as it actually appeared to an acute 
 and careful observer. He has followed the foot- 
 steps of Nature in all her moods and disguises 
 wit^ii the devotion of a lover; he does not study 
 her movements like a philosopher ; his enjoyment 
 of her beauty is fresh and spontaneous as a child's. 
 Hence his descriptive verse glows with a fresh 
 summer coloring which puts to shame the autum- 
 nal faded tints of Bryant. His fancy is more 
 iridescent than that of Wordsworth. The ripple 
 of gayety, which ruffles the depths of spiritual feel- 
 ing, imparts a marvellous charm and variety to 
 his poetry. Nature possesses him, not he Nature ; 
 Wordsworth finds Nature mirrored in his own 
 heart ; Lowell sees himself reflected in Nature : — 
 
 " ' I was the wind that dapples the lush grass, 
 The tide that crept with coolness to its roots, 
 The thin-winged swallow skating on the air. ' 
 
 In other words, he lets himself swoon away on the 
 breast of Nature, and merges in hers his own per- 
 
DIPLOMATIC SERVICE ABROAD. 
 
 175 
 
 sonality. The lofty rapture, the strong, single- 
 hearted joy of Wordsworth belongs to a higher 
 kind of poetry. But it is obvious that Lowell's 
 more sensuous feeling enables him to depict Na- 
 ture with a greater directness than the more sub- 
 jective and brooding passion of the English poet 
 will allow. In the unfailing freshness of his illus- 
 trations, the local truth of his descriptive touches, 
 the rich catholicity of his acquirements, the solid 
 basis of his practical understanding, Lowell com- 
 bines, as has been said, the best qualities of his 
 class. He stands, in our opinion, first among the 
 American poets of culture. To him America owes 
 her finest satire, her noblest ode, and her truest 
 descriptive poetry," 
 
CHAPTER XIV. 
 
 LOWELL AT WESTMINSTER ABBEY. 
 
 WHEN the bust of Samuel Taylor Coleridge 
 was unveiled in Westminster Abbey, 
 Lowell was invited to deliver the panegyric. 
 
 Previous to the ceremony of the unveiling of 
 the bust, a preliminary gathering was held in the 
 Chapter House. Dean Bradley and Mr. Lowell 
 entered the Chapter House arm in arm. The dean 
 made a short speech, in which he said he heartily 
 sympathized with the object of the meeting. He 
 paid a high tribute to Mr. Lowell, and said that 
 he was eminently fitted to perform the duty of 
 unveiling the statue. The ceremony, he said, 
 would add another link to the many that already 
 bound together England and America. 
 
 Mr. Lowell replied that he preferred that the 
 task of unveiling the statue had been trusted to 
 worthier hands, but the fact that the bust is a 
 gift of the late Rev. Dr. Mercier of Rhode Island, 
 through his executrix, Mrs. Pell, supplied that 
 argument of fitness which would otherwise have 
 176 
 
LOWELL AT WESTMINSTER ABBEY. 177 
 
 been absent. He continued: "All the waters of 
 the Atlantic cannot wash out of the consciousness 
 of either nation that we hold our intellectual prop- 
 erty in common. The literary traditions and fame 
 of those who shed lustre upon our race remain an 
 undivided inheritance. Coleridge's works are a 
 companion and teacher in the happiest hours of 
 our youth, and in old age recall the radiant image 
 of youth which we have lost. Surely there are no 
 friends so constant as poets. Among them none 
 are more faithful than Coleridge. Just fifty-one 
 years ago I became possessed of a pirated Amer- 
 ican reprint of Coleridge, Shelley and Keats, and I 
 trust I may be pardoned for the delight I took in 
 it. Coleridge was a metaphysical teacher and 
 interpreter whose services are incalculable." 
 
 Mr. Lowell said he admired especially the " An- 
 cient Mariner," far more indeed than " Christabel." 
 Mr. Coleridge was a man of artless simplicity, and 
 yet a finished scholar, although not exact. He 
 owed much to the poetry of others, but most to 
 his own native genius. He was picturesque in 
 the best sense of the term. Mr. Lowell concluded, 
 "This is neither the time nor place to speak of 
 Coleridge's conduct to himself, his family or the 
 world. He left behind him a great name. Let 
 those who are blameless cast the first stone at one 
 
178 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 
 
 who might have been better had he possessed 
 those business faculties which make man respect- 
 able. He left us such a legacy as only genius, 
 and genius not always, can leave." 
 
 Lord Coleridge returned thanks on behalf of 
 the family. The assemblage then went to the 
 Poets' Corner, and Mr. Lowell formally unveiled 
 the statue, which bears the simple inscription, 
 " Samuel Taylor Coleridge." 
 
 A well-known American writer referring to this 
 eulogy upon Coleridge says : — 
 
 " To say that Mr. Lowell's address at the unveil- 
 ing of the Coleridge bust in Westminster Abbey 
 has distinctly bettered expectation, is perhaps the 
 most forcible compliment that could be paid it. 
 No one questioned the fitness, under the circum- 
 stances, of inviting Mr. Lowell to perform this 
 task, and no one doubted that the speaker would 
 rise fully to the occasion. But Mr. Lowell might 
 have done this and still not have paid so just and 
 so comprehensive a tribute to the genius of a man 
 who, though often admired and even idolized, has, 
 on the whole, been misunderstood by his admirers. 
 The 'mania for moral dissection,' as it has been 
 called, has led aside Coleridge's critics from the 
 discussion of what he did, to speculation as to 
 what he might have done. But a truer standard 
 
LOWELL AT WESTMINSTER ABBEY. 179 
 
 of criticism demands that ability shall be judged, 
 not by its lowest, but by its highest achievement. 
 Mr. Lowell, therefore, does well to dismiss with a 
 few words Coleridge's efforts in metaphysics, and 
 to judge him only by his purely literary work. In 
 a study of the mind and art of the man, this would 
 of course be an inadequate method of investiga- 
 tion ; in an estimate of his permanent place in 
 literature, however, it fulfils every essential condi- 
 tion. 
 
 " It would be superfluous to comment in detail 
 upon an address which our readers have already 
 had the opportunity to read in full. But this 
 point, at least, may fitly be emphasized. While 
 Mr. Lowell claims for Coleridge a high place 
 among the imaginative writers of the world, he 
 yet indirectly admits upon what a slender footing 
 that claim must stand. Leave out ' The Rime of 
 the Ancient Mariner' and ' Christabel,' and Col- 
 eridge would to-day be a half-forgotten name. Of 
 course he did much more that was of value to the 
 world than write these two poems. As Mr. Low- 
 ell says, 'he certainly was a main influence in 
 showing the English mind how it could emanci- 
 pate itself from the vulgarizing tyranny of com- 
 mon sense.' And in criticism, also, he did indeed 
 do 'incalculable service.' But his magnitude in 
 
i8o JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 
 
 the intellectual firmament depends primarily upon 
 his position as a poet. Mr. Lowell has too large 
 a share of that best gift of the critic — the sense 
 of humor — to emphasize unduly the weaker and 
 poorer side of Coleridge's literary character. Col- 
 eridge was able to sail on the deep sea of litera- 
 ture, but after one successful voyage he was 
 content to paddle among the shallows. Over this 
 pitiable trifling with unusual talents, Mr. Lowell 
 properly draws a veil. The mental procrastination, 
 the idling away of intellectual powers, does not 
 lessen the value of what is really accomplished. 
 ' Nothing is more certain,' says Mr. Lowell, 
 ' than that our personal weaknesses exact the 
 utmost farthing of penalty from us while we live.' 
 There is little need of posterity to inculcate moral 
 lessons by pointing the finger of scorn. 
 
 " One excuse for Coleridge, which Mr. Lowell, 
 singularly enough, does not mention, will be found 
 in the influence which Wordsworth exerted upon 
 him. It was, upon the whole, harmful. The busi- 
 ness faculty, which, according to Mr. Lowell, makes 
 Wordsworth ' so almost irritatingly respectable,' 
 could not be acquired by Coleridge. Words- 
 worth's habit of thought was one which he could 
 not emulateand ought not to have followed. Words- 
 worth gave impetus to Coleridge at one period and 
 
LOWELL AT WESTMINSTER ABBEY. igi 
 
 another of indeGision ; but, on the other hand, he 
 depressed his finely imaginative spirit, and led him 
 away from the poetry in which he was easily 
 master to the philosophy in which he was at best 
 imitator and disciple. Coleridge was unfortunate 
 in temper and habits. But he was also unfortu- 
 nate in the friendships and the conditions of his 
 career." 
 
CHAPTER XV. 
 
 LOWELL AT ST. OLAVES. 
 
 WHEN at the old church of St. Olaves in 
 London a memorial was dedicated to 
 Samuel Pepys, our Minister Lowell was again 
 called upon to deliver the address. 
 
 " Lowell said he felt himself embarrassed by the 
 weight of unexpected responsibility left on his 
 shoulders by the absence of Lord Northbrook. 
 For himself, he was glad to come there to say a 
 few words — particularly glad, indeed, to come on 
 occasions like that ; and he should have been glad 
 if the first lord had been present, for he should 
 then have had the opportunity of expressing pub- 
 licly the high appreciation of the American Govern- 
 ment and people at the graceful act lately performed 
 by the British Government in the gift of the ship 
 Alert. It was proper, His Excellency said, that 
 he should read a note he had received from Lord 
 Northbrook. This was dated that day from the 
 Admiralty, and was as follows : — 
 
 182 
 
LOWELL AT ST. OLAVES. 183 
 
 My Dear Mr. Lowell: 
 
 I am very much annoyed that I am prevented from assisting at 
 the ceremony to-day. It would be very good if you would say 
 that nothing but very urgent business would have kept me away. 
 I am anxious to give my testimony to the merits of Pepys as an 
 admiralty official, leaving his literary merits to you. He was con- 
 cerned with the administration of the navy from the Restoration 
 to the Revolution, and from 1673 as secretary. I believe his merits 
 to be fairly stated in a contemporary account, which I send. 
 Yours very truly, 
 
 NORTHBROOK. 
 
 The contemporary account which Lord North- 
 brook was good enough to send him, said : — 
 
 " ' Pepys was, without exception, the greatest and 
 most useful minister that ever filled the same 
 situations in England, the acts and registers of 
 the admiralty proving this beyond contradiction. 
 The principal rules and establishments in present 
 use in these offices are well known to have been of 
 his introducing, and most of the officers serving 
 therein since the Restoration of his bringing up. 
 He was a most studious promoter and strenuous 
 asserter of order and discipline. Sobriety, dili- 
 gence, capacity, loyalty and subjection to com- 
 mand were essentials required in all whom he- 
 advanced. Where any of these were found want- 
 ing, no interest or authority was capable of moving 
 him in favor of the highest pretender. Discharg- 
 
184 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 
 
 ing his duty to his prince and country with a reli- 
 gious application and perfect integrity, he feared 
 no one, courted no one, and neglected his own 
 fortune.' 
 
 " That was a character drawn, it was true, by a 
 friendly hand, but to those who were familiar with 
 the life of Pepys the description hardly seemed an 
 exaggerated one. But, as regarded his ofHcial 
 life, it was unnecessary to dilate upon his pecu- 
 liar characteristics in this respect, for all knew 
 how faithful he was in his official duties, and all 
 knew, too, how many faithful officials there were 
 working on in obscurity, who were not only 
 never honored with a monument, but who never 
 expected one. The few words, Mr. Lowell went 
 on to remark, which he was expected to say upon 
 that occasion, therefore, referred rather to what 
 he believed was the true motive which had brought 
 that assembly together, and that was not merely 
 the character of Pepys either as clerk to the Acts 
 or as secretary to the Admiralty. That was not 
 the place in which one could go into a very close 
 examination of the character of Pepys as a private 
 man. He would begin by admitting that Pepys 
 was a type, perhaps, of what was now called a 
 * Philistine.' We had no word in England which 
 was equivalent to the French word bourgeois ; but. 
 
LOWELL AT ST. OLAVES. 
 
 i8S 
 
 at all events, Samuel Pepys was the most perfect 
 type that ever existed of the class of people whom 
 this word described. He had all its merits as well 
 as many of its defects. With all those defects, 
 however, — into which it was there unnecessary 
 to go, — Pepys had written one of the most delight- 
 ful books that it was man's privilege to read in 
 the English language or in any other. Whether 
 Pepys intended this diary to be afterwards read 
 by the general public or not — and this was a 
 doubtful question when it was considered that he 
 had left, possibly by inadvertence, a key to his 
 cipher behind him — it was certain that he had 
 left with us a most delightful picture. 
 
 " ' His love of dress, his credulity, his meanness, 
 as well as his generosity and his want of imagina- 
 tive faculty,' were all mentioned as among the 
 faults of Samuel Pepys. These, it was true, were 
 serious charges, but as regarded the statement 
 of Pepys' want of the imaginative faculty, it was 
 to be remembered that had the author of the 
 favorite diary been possessed to any great extent 
 of this undoubtedly important faculty, his journal 
 would never have possessed the charm to thou- 
 sands of its readers of being so thoroughly in- 
 genuous. Still, even with some of those faults 
 admitted, one could not afford to banish Pepys, 
 
i86 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 
 
 and, the speaker continued, such a suggestion 
 called to mind the passage in Shakespeare's play 
 of 'King Henry IV.' when Falstaff was on his 
 trial. His hearers would remember that when 
 the suggestion was made that Jack Falstaff 
 should be banished, the fat knight made remark, 
 ' No, my good lord, banish Peto, banish Bardolph, 
 banish Poins ; but for sweet Jack Falstaff, kind 
 Jack Falstaff, true Jack Falstaff, valiant Jack 
 Falstaff, and therefore more valiant, being, as he 
 is, old Jack Falstaff, banish not him thy Harry's 
 company. Banish plump Jack, and banish all the 
 world.' And- the prince, in reply, said, ' I do, I 
 will.' He could not help thinking that they had 
 a somewhat similar train of thought in connection 
 with Pepys as Falstaff raised in defence of himself. 
 If one were to ask what were the reasons for liking 
 Pepys, it would be found that they were as numer- 
 ous as the days upon which he entered his diary, 
 and surely that was sufficient argument in his favor. 
 There was no book, Mr. Lowell said, that he knew 
 of, or that occurred to his memory, with which 
 Pepys' Diary could fairly be compared, and the 
 book was certainly unique in one respect, and that 
 was the absolute sincerity of the author with him- 
 self. The very fact of that sincerity of the author 
 with himself argued a certain greatness of character. 
 
LOWELL AT ST. OLA VMS. 187 
 
 Dr. Hicks, who attended Peyps at his death-bed, 
 spoke of him as 'this great man,' and said he 
 knew no one who died so greatly. And yet there 
 was something almost of the ridiculous in the state- 
 ment when the ' greatness ' was compared with 
 the absolute frankness which Pepys showed towards 
 himself. There was no parallel of character to 
 that of Pepys, he believed, in respect of naivete, 
 unless it were found in the character of Falstaff, 
 and Pepys showed himself, too, to have a nature 
 which was thoroughly intimate with himself. Fal- 
 staff had just the same naivete ; but in Falstaff it 
 was the naivete of conscious humorousness. But 
 in Pepys it was quite different, for Pepys naivete 
 was the honest frankness of a man who thoroughly 
 knew himself. Falstaff had a sense, too, of in- 
 advertent humor, but it was questionable whether 
 Pepys had a sense of humor at all, and he certainly 
 had very little sense of wit. There was probably, 
 however, more involuntary humor in Pepys' diary 
 than there was in any other book extant. When he 
 told his readers of the landing of Charles II. at 
 Dover, for instance, it would be remembered how 
 Pepys chronicled the fact that the mayor of Dover 
 presented the prince with a Bible, for which he 
 returned his thanks and said it was the 'most 
 precious book to him in the world.' Then, again. 
 
1 88 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 
 
 it would be remembered that he received a. letter 
 addressed ' Samuel Pepys, Esq.,' and confessed 
 in the diary that this pleased him mightily. When, 
 too, he kissed his cook's maid, he confessed he 
 was not sorry for it, but he was sorry that the 
 foot-boy of a worthy knight with whom he was 
 acquainted saw him do it. And a last instance he 
 would mention of poor Pepys' naivete was when he 
 said in the diary that he could not help feeling a 
 certain pleasant and satisfied feeling when Barlow 
 died. Barlow, it must be remembered, received, 
 during his life, the yearly sum from Pepys of ;£ioo. 
 The value of Pepys' book was simply priceless, 
 and while there was nothing in it approaching that 
 single page in St. Simon where he described that 
 swarm of red-heeled creatures passing from one 
 part of the palace to another as the prince was 
 lying on his deathbed, and the source of favor was 
 lying in the balance, still Pepys' diary was un- 
 equalled for the peculiar reasons he had described. 
 The lightest part of the diary was of value, histori- 
 cally, for it enabled one to see London of two 
 hundred years ago, and, what was more, to see it 
 with the eyes of Pepys. It was not Pepys the 
 official who had brought that large gathering to- 
 gether that day in honor of his memory ; it was 
 Pepys the diarist. As to all the charges which 
 
LOWELL AT ST. OLAVES. 189 
 
 had been brought against Pepys, Mr. Lowell said 
 if they could not altogether acquit him, they could 
 punish him with the slightest possible penalty ; 
 and probably the heaviest penalty which was now 
 laid upon departed greatness was a statue." 
 
CHAPTER XVI. 
 
 THE LONGFELLOW MEMORIAL AT WESTMINSTER 
 ABBEY. 
 
 o 
 
 N Longfellow's birthday, the twenty-seventh 
 of February, 1 867, Lowell had written : — 
 
 " With loving breath of all the winds his name 
 Is blown about the world, but to his friends 
 A sweeter secret hides behind his fame, 
 And Love steals shyly through the loud acclaim 
 To murmur a God bless you ! and there ends." 
 
 " There was a peculiar fitness in the author of the 
 above, as the representative of the English-speak- 
 ing nations, giving voice to the sentiments naturally 
 suggested by an occasion so memorable as the 
 uncovering of Longfellow's statue in Westminster 
 Abbey. He has supplied the tie that binds the 
 educated classes of England with those on this 
 side of the Atlantic, and therein secured an in- 
 fluence never exerted but for the advancement 
 of American interests. Mr. Lowell's mission to 
 Victoria's court was to smooth down prejudice, 
 while conquering asperity, to the end of uniting 
 190 
 
THE LONGFELLOW MEMORIAL. 
 
 191 
 
 England and the United States in such bonds of 
 friendly feeling that no sudden gusts of passion 
 can sweep them away. What a powerful element 
 for that object, though working silently, has been 
 his high repute abroad as a man of extensive cul- 
 ture and great literary achievement ! The fact of 
 Longfellow's ' animated bust ' having been placed 
 in Westminster Abbey is hardly more noteworthy 
 than the circumstance that in the grand march of 
 events it became James Russell Lowell's duty and 
 privilege — so long a townsman, friend and admirer 
 of the -great American poet, and, like him, having 
 won undisputed eminence on fields where fancy 
 and imagination roam without constraint — to be 
 the central figure in services attesting the un- 
 limited respect that all Englishmen worthy of 
 the name pay to intellectual superiority wherever 
 displayed." 
 
 The following interesting account of the Long- 
 fellow Memorial Services at Westminster Abbey 
 is given by an eye witness : — 
 
 " Previous to the ceremony of unveiling a bust of 
 Longfellow in Poets' Corner, Westminster Abbey, 
 on the 1st inst., a meeting of the subscribers was 
 held in Jerusalem Chamber. In the absence of 
 Dean Bradley, owing to a death in his family, the 
 sub-dean was called to the chair. 
 
192 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 
 
 " After a brief statement by Dr. Dennett, Earl 
 Granville presented the bust to the sub-dean. 
 
 " Minister Lowell then said : ' Mr. Sub-Dean, my 
 lords, ladies and gentlemen — I think I may take 
 upon myself the responsibility, in the name "of the 
 daughters of my beloved friend, to exjjress their 
 gratitude to Lord Granville for having found time 
 amid the continuous and arduous calls of his duty 
 to be present here this morning. Having occasion 
 to speak in this place some two years ago, I remem- 
 ber that I then expressed the hope that some day 
 or other the Abbey of Westminster would become 
 the Valhalla of the whole English-speaking race. 
 I little expected then that a beginning would be 
 made so soon — a beginning at once painful and 
 gratifying in the highest degree to myself — with 
 the bust of my friend. Though there be no academy 
 in England which corresponds to that of France, 
 yet admission to Westminster Abbey forms a sort 
 of posthumous test of literary eminence perhaps 
 as effectual. Every one of us has his own private 
 Valhalla, and it is not apt to be populous. But the 
 conditions of admission to the Abbey are very differ- 
 ent. We ought no longer to ask why is so-and-so 
 here, and we ought always to be able to answer 
 the question why such a one is not here. I think 
 that on this occasion I should express the united 
 
THE LONGFELLOW MEMORIAL. 153 
 
 feeling of the whole English-speaking race in con- 
 firming the choice which has been made — the 
 choice of one whose name is dear to them all, who 
 has inspired their lives and consoled their hearts, 
 and who has been admitted to the fireside of all of 
 them as a familiar friend. Nearly forty years ago 
 I had occasion, in speaking of Mr. Longfellow, to 
 suggest an analogy between him and the English 
 poet Gray, and I have never since seen any reason 
 to modify or change that opinion. There are cer- 
 tain very marked analogies between them, I think. 
 In the first place there is the same love of a certain 
 subdued splendor not inconsistent with transpar- 
 ency of diction ; there is the same power of absorb- 
 ing and assimilating the beauties of other literature 
 without loss of originality ; and above all there is 
 that genius, that sympathy with universal senti- 
 ments and the power of expressing them so that 
 they come home to everybody, both high and low, 
 which characterize both poets. There is some- 
 thing also in that simplicity — simplicity in itself 
 being a distinction ; but in style, simplicity and 
 distinction must be combined in order to their 
 proper effect, and the only warrant perhaps of 
 permanence in literature is this distinction in style. 
 It is something quite indefinable, it is something 
 like the distinction of good breeding, characterized 
 
194 JAMES XUSSELL LOWELL. 
 
 rather by the absence of certain negative qualities 
 than by the presence of certain positive ones, but 
 it seems to me that distinction of style is eminently 
 found in the poet whom we are met here in some 
 sense to celebrate to-day. This is not the place 
 of course for criticism, still less is it the place for 
 eulogy, for eulogy is but too often disguised apology. 
 But I have been struck particularly — if I may 
 bring forward one instance — with some of my 
 late friend's sonnets, which seem to me to be some 
 of the most beautiful and perfect we have in the 
 language. They remind me of one of those cabinets 
 which I have sometimes seen, in which many of 
 the drawers are unlocked by a single key. I have 
 seen sonnets in which there is a separate lock for 
 every line, and after fumbling among our fourteen 
 keys we sometimes find ourselves in certain con- 
 fusion. Added to this there would be sometimes 
 a conundrum of secret drawers. But there was 
 nothing of this in him. His mind always moved 
 straight towards its object, and was always per- 
 meated with the emotion that gave it frankness 
 and sincerity, and at the same time the most ample 
 expression. It seems that I should add a few words, 
 in fact I cannot refrain from adding a few words, 
 with regard to the personal character of a man whom 
 I knew for more than forty years, and whose friend 
 
TBE LONGFELLOW MEMORIAL. igj 
 
 I was honored to call myself for thirty years. 
 Never was a private character more answerable 
 to public performance than that of Longfellow. 
 Never have I known a more beautiful character. 
 I was familiar with it daily — with the constant 
 charity of his hand and of his mind. His nature 
 was consecrated ground, into which no unclean 
 spirit could ever enter. I feel entirely how inade- 
 quate anything that I can say is to the measure 
 and proportion of an occasion like this. But I 
 think I am authorized to accept in the name of 
 the American people this tribute to not the least 
 distinguished of her sons, to a man who in every 
 way, both in public and in private, did honor to 
 the country that gave him birth. I cannot add 
 anything more to what was so well said in a few 
 words by Lord Granville, for I do not think that 
 these occasions are precisely the occasions for set 
 discourses, but rather for a few words of feeling, 
 of gratitude and of appreciation.' 
 
 " The sub-dean, in accepting the bust, remarked 
 that it was impossible not to feel in doing so they 
 were accepting a very great honor to the country. 
 A vote of thanks to the secretary and treasurer of 
 the memorial fund was passed and the company 
 then proceeded to the Pofets' Corner, where, after 
 brief remarks by the sub-dean, the covering 
 
196 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 
 
 was removed from the bust and the ceremony 
 ended." 
 
 The inscription upon this bust of Longfellow 
 reads as follows : — 
 
 " This bust was placed among the memorials of 
 the poets of England by the English admirers of 
 an American poet." 
 
CHAPTER XVII. 
 
 ADDRESS ON DEMOCRACY. 
 
 ON the sixth of October, 1884, Lowell, as 
 President of the Midland Institute, in 
 Birmingham, England, was invited to deliver the 
 inaugural address. He chose for his subject, 
 " Democracy," and from this fine address the fol- 
 lowing quotations are taken : — 
 
 " I have grown to manhood, and am now grow- 
 ing old with the growth of this system of govern- 
 ment of my native land, have watched its advances, 
 or what some would call its encroachments, gradual 
 and irresistible as those of a glacier, have been an 
 ear witness to the forebodings of wise and good 
 and timid men, and have lived to see those fore- 
 bodings belied by the course of events, which is 
 apt to show itself humorously careless of the repu- 
 tation of prophets. I recollect hearing a sagacious 
 old gentleman say in 1840 that the doing away 
 with the property qualification for suffrage twenty 
 years before had been the ruin of the State of 
 Massachusetts ; that it had put public credit and 
 
 197 
 
ig8 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 
 
 private estate alike at the mercy of demagogues. 
 I lived to see that Commonwealth tvi^enty odd years 
 later paying the interest on her bonds in gold, 
 though it cost her sometimes nearly three for one to 
 keep her faith, and that while suffering an unpar- 
 alleled drain of men and treasure in helping to 
 sustain the unity and self-respect of the nation. 
 I hear America sometimes playfully accused of 
 sending you all your storms, and am in the habit 
 of parrying the charge by alleging that we are en- 
 abled to do this because, in virtue of our protective 
 system, we can afford to make better bad weather 
 than anybody else. And what wiser use could we 
 make of it than to export it in return for the 
 paupers which some European countries are 
 good enough to send over to us who have not 
 attained to the same skill in the manufacture of 
 them.?" 
 
 Further on he says : — 
 
 "Formerly the immense majority of men — our 
 brothers — knew only their sufferings, their wants 
 and their desires. They are beginning now to 
 know their opportunity and their power. All per- 
 sons who see deeper than their plates are rather 
 inclined to thank God for it than to bewail it, for 
 the sores of Lazarus have a poison in them against 
 which Dives has no antidote. 
 
ADDRESS ON DEMOCRACY. 
 
 199 
 
 " There can be no doubt that the spectacle of a 
 great and prosperous democracy on the other side 
 of the Atlantic must react powerfully on the aspi- 
 rations and political theories of men in the Old 
 World who do not find things to their mind ; but 
 whether for good or evil, it should not be over- 
 looked that the acorn from which it sprang was 
 ripened on the British oak. Every successive 
 swarm that has gone out from this officina gentium 
 has, when left to its own instincts — may I not call 
 them hereditary instincts? — assumed a more or 
 less thoroughly democratic form. This would 
 seem to show what I believe to be the fact, that 
 the British constitution, under whatever disguises 
 of prudence or decorum, is essentially democratic. 
 People are continually saying that America is in 
 the air, and I am glad to think it is, since this 
 means only that a clearer conception of human 
 claims and human duties is beginning to be preva- 
 lent. The discontent with the existing order of 
 things, however, pervaded the atmosphere wher- 
 ever the conditions were favorable, long before 
 Columbus, seeking the back door of Asia, found 
 himself knocking at the front door of America. I 
 say wherever the conditions were favorable, for it 
 is certain that the germs of disease do not stick or 
 find a prosperous field for their development and 
 
200 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 
 
 noxious activity unless where the simplest sanitary 
 precautions have been neglected." 
 
 Speaking a word for the Irish-American, he 
 exclaims : — 
 
 "We have taken from Europe the poorest, the 
 most ignorant, the most turbulent of her people, 
 and have made them over into good citizens who 
 have added to our wealth, and who are ready to 
 die in defence of a country and of institutions 
 which they know to be worth dying for. The 
 exceptions have been (and they are lamentable 
 exceptions) where these hordes of ignorance and 
 poverty have coagulated in great cities. But the 
 social system is yet to seek which has not to look 
 the same terrible wolf in the eyes. On the other 
 hand, at this very moment Irish peasants are buy- 
 ing up the worn-out farms of Massachusetts, and 
 making them productive again by the same virtues 
 of industry and thrift that once made them profit- 
 able to the English ancestors of the men who are 
 deserting them. To have achieved even these 
 prosaic results (if you choose to call them so), and 
 that 6ut of materials the most discordant, I might 
 say the most recalcitrant, argues a certain benefi- 
 cent virtue in the system that could do it, and is 
 not to be accounted for by mere luck." 
 
 In defining democracy he says : — 
 
ADDRESS ON DEMOCRACY. 201 
 
 "We should remember that nothing is more 
 natural for people whose education has been neg- 
 lected than to spell evolution with an initial 'r.' 
 A great man struggling with the storms of fate 
 has been called a sublime spectacle ; but surely a 
 great man wrestling with these new forces that 
 have come into the world, masteripg them and 
 controlling them to beneficent ends, would be a yet 
 sublimer. Here is not a danger, and if there were 
 it would be only a better school of manhood, a 
 nobler scope for ambition. I have hinted that 
 what people are afraid of in democracy is less the 
 thing itself than what they conceive to be its 
 necessary adjuncts and consequences. It is sup- 
 posed to reduce all mankind to a dead level of 
 mediocrity in character and culture, to vulgarize 
 men's conceptions of life, and therefore their code 
 of morals, manners and conduct — to endanger 
 the rights of property and possession. But I be- 
 lieve that the real gravamen of the charges lies in 
 the habit it' has of making itself generally disa- 
 greeable by asking the powers that be, at the 
 most inconvenient moment, whether they are the 
 powers that ought to be. If the powers that be 
 are in a condition to give a satisfactory answer to 
 this inevitable question, they need feel in no way 
 discomfited by it. 
 
202 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 
 
 " Few people take the trouble of trying to find 
 out what democracy really is. Yet this would be 
 a great help, for it is our lawless and uncertain 
 thoughts, it is indefiniteness of our impressions, 
 that fill darkness, whether mental or physical, with 
 spectres and hobgoblins. Democracy is nothing 
 more than an experiment in government, more 
 likely to succeed in a new soil, but likely to be tried 
 in all soils, which must stand orfall on its own merits 
 as others have done before it. For there is no 
 trick of perpetual motion in politics any more than 
 in mechanics. President Lincoln defined democ- 
 racy to be ' the government of the people, by the 
 people, for the people.' This is a sufficiently com- 
 pact statement of it as a political arrangement. 
 Theodore Parker said that ' Democracy meant not 
 "I'm as good as you are," but "you're as good as 
 I am." ' And this is the ethical conception of it, 
 necessary as the complement of the other ; a con- 
 ception which, could it be made actual and practi- 
 cal, would easily solve all the riddles that the old 
 sphinx of political and social economy who sits by 
 the roadside has been proposing to mankind from 
 the beginning, and which mankind have such a 
 singular talent for answering wrongly. In this 
 sense Christ was the first true democrat that ever 
 breathed, as the old dramatist Dekker said he was 
 
ADDRESS ON DEMOCRACY. 
 
 203 
 
 the first true gentleman. The characters may be 
 easily doubled, so strong is the likeness between 
 them. A beautiful and profound parable of the 
 Persian poet, Jelal-ed-Deen, tells us that ' One 
 knocked at the Beloved's door, and a voice asked 
 from within, " Who is there .' " and he answered, 
 "It is I." Then the voice answered, "This house 
 will not hold thee and me ' ; and the door was not 
 opened. Then went the lover into the desert and 
 fasted and prayed in solitude, and after a year he 
 returned and knocked again at the door, and again 
 the voice asked, "Who is there.?" and he said, "It 
 is thyself" ; and the door was opened to him.' But 
 that is idealism, you will say, and this is an only 
 too practical world. I grant it ; but I am one of 
 those who believe that the real will never find an 
 irremovable basis till it rests on the ideal." 
 
 Referring to this address upon " Democracy," a 
 certain American writer says : — 
 
 " Considering Mr. Lowell's representative char- 
 acter, added to his individual standing in society 
 and letters, this enunciation by him of an import- 
 ant truth, patent to almost everybody conversant 
 with the inclination of affairs on the other side of 
 the Atlantic, must have a marked effect upon 
 cultivated Europeans. Lowell's genial, semi-hu- 
 morous mode of conveying important revelations 
 
204 ^ JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 
 
 disarms them of the power of creating offence, 
 and therefore invests them with a subtler yet wider 
 influence. He didn't fail of making his meaning 
 clear to the Birmingham audience that the Amer- 
 ican republic was gradually rooting out all the anti- 
 democratic features of the British constitution. 
 Yet he sugar-coated the pill, as it were, by ascrib- 
 ing to this instrument essentially democratic qual- 
 ities. How much more politic and effective this 
 was than would have been a slap-dash assault on 
 the monarchy and the titled families ! Mr. Lowell 
 in this surely gives no indication of having lost his 
 balance because of the flattering attentions he has 
 received from what are denominated the higher 
 classes of England ; courtesies which, it must be 
 said, reflected honor upon those bestowing them, 
 as they attested their exalted estimate of Lowell 
 for his achievements in the domain of letters. 
 Lowell does not pose as a violent propagandist of 
 American governmental ideas. But none the less 
 will his inculcation of democracy steal into the 
 public sentiment of Great Britain, and remain 
 there to assist in modifying and finally eradicating 
 the aristocratic features of the British constitution. " 
 
CHAPTER XVIII. 
 England's farewell to lowell. 
 
 THE announcement that President Cleveland 
 had appointed Mr. Phelps to succeed James 
 Russell Lowell as ambassador at the court of St. 
 James, was received in England with universal 
 regret. 
 
 Said the London Times : — 
 
 "It might have been well for the relations of 
 the two countries had Mr. Lowell been permitted 
 permanently to retain his post as United States 
 minister in England. It is no disparagement to 
 his successor, whoever he may be, to say that he 
 cannot well be to either country all that Mr. 
 Lowell has been." 
 
 The Daily News observed : — 
 
 "We have no doubt that Mr. Phelps, whose 
 name Mr. Cleveland has submitted to the Senate, 
 deserves all that our New York correspondent says 
 in his favor. But the satisfaction with which ^we 
 shall welcome the coming guest is less than the 
 205 
 
2o6 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 
 
 sorrow with which we shall speed the parting one. 
 Mr. Lowell has been in more than a diplomatic 
 sense the representative of his country in ours. 
 He has been, to speak in terms of Greek usage, 
 a sort of guest-friend of England. He has been 
 the representative of what is best in American 
 culture and in American literature." 
 
 Lowell, in finishing his speech at the unveiling of 
 the bust of Gray at Pembroke College, Cambridge, 
 England, said that "this would, in all probability, 
 be the last occasion on which he would have the 
 opportunity of addressing Englishmen in public. 
 He wished, therefore, to express his most heartfelt 
 gratitude for the kindness which had surrounded 
 him for the last four years in his official and in his 
 private life, and had made both delightful. He 
 had come among them as a far-away cousin, and 
 they were sending him away as something very 
 like a brother." 
 
 Whereupon " Punch " replies : — 
 
 " Send j/«< away .' No, lyOwell, no, 
 
 That phrase, indeed, is scarce well chosen. 
 We're glad, of course, to have you go 
 
 More like a brother than a cousin ; 
 True, we must " speed the parting guest," 
 
 If such a guest from us must sever, 
 But what we all should like the best 
 
 Would be to keep you here for ever. 
 
ENGLAND'S FAREWELL TO LOWELL. 207 
 
 " You've won our hearts ; your words, your ways, 
 
 Are what we like. Without desiring 
 To sicken you with fulsome praise. 
 
 We think you've seen no signs of tiring. 
 Of graceful speech, of pleasant lore, 
 
 How much to you the English mind owes I 
 We're sad to think we'll see no more 
 
 Of you — save through your Study Windows. 
 
 " Well, well, the best of friends must part; 
 
 That's ' commonplace,' like Gray, but true, sir. 
 Commend us to the Yankee heart. 
 
 If you can come again, why, do, sir. 
 What Biglow calls our ' English Sarse ' 
 
 Is not all tarts and bitters, is it.? 
 Farewell ! — if from us you must pass, 
 
 But try, do try, another visit I " 
 
 The following is an extract from the address 
 delivered by James Jussell Lowell on the occasion 
 of the unveiling of the bust of the poet Gray in the 
 hall of Pembroke College, Cambridge, England: — 
 
 " I have been asked to say a few words, but they 
 must be very few, as the train is waiting for me 
 that takes me back to keep an engagement. Mr. 
 Gosse has told you he has been present at many 
 memorial unveilings, and the newspapers inform 
 me that I also have been present at the unveiling 
 of perhaps too many. But never have I been 
 present on any occasion with more pleasure than 
 
2o8 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 
 
 on this. You have now, in the words which Lord 
 Houghton quoted, and which I would extend in a 
 wider sense than he did, a beautiful memorial to 
 Gray in permanent form. We also, thanks to Mr. 
 Gosse, possess a photograph of this memorial in 
 permanent form. But we have in our hearts and 
 memories, I think, a memorial to the man quite as 
 true and quite as permanent — that is, permanent 
 for us. Very few words are fitting on an occasion 
 which commemorates the one of the English poets 
 who has written less and pleased more, perhaps, 
 than any other. There is a certain appropriate- 
 ness in my speaking here to-day. I come here to 
 speak simply as the representative of several coun- 
 trymen and countrywomen of mine who have re- 
 newed that affirmation which I like always to renew 
 of the unity of our English race by giving some- 
 thing more solid than words in commemoration of 
 the poet they loved. And I think there is another 
 claim which I perhaps have for speaking here to- 
 day, and that is that the most picturesque anecdote 
 relative to the life of Gray — perhaps the most pict- 
 uresque related of the life of any poet, certainly 
 of any English poet — belongs to the Western 
 hemisphere. I mean the anecdote which connects 
 the name of Wolfe with that of Gray. Nothing 
 could have been more picturesque than the sur- 
 
ENGLAND'S FAREWELL TO LOWELL. 209 
 
 roundings of that saying of Wolfe's — of that Eng- 
 lish hero — and nothing could have been more 
 momentous than the action and the consequence 
 that followed from it, and which made the United 
 States, which I have lately represented, possible. 
 That, I think, gives me a certain right also to 
 speak here. I know that sometimes criticisms 
 are made upon Gray. I think I have often heard 
 him called by some of our juniors 'commonplace.' 
 Upon my word, I think it a compliment. I think 
 it shows a certain generality of application in what 
 Gray has done, for if there is one thing more than 
 another — I say this to the young men whom I see 
 seated around both sides of the hall — which in- 
 sures the lead in life, it is the commonplace. I 
 have to measure my poets, my authors, by their 
 lasting power, and I find Gray has a great deal of 
 it. He not only pleases my youth and my age, but 
 he pleases other people's youth and age, and I 
 cannot help thinking this is a proof that he touches 
 on human nature at a great many periods and at a 
 great many levels, and, perhaps, that is as high a 
 compliment as can be paid to the poet. There is, 
 I admit, a certain commonplaceness of sentiment 
 in his most famous poem, but I think there is also 
 a certain commonplaceness of sentiment in some 
 verses that have been famous for more than three 
 
2IO JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 
 
 thousand years. I think that when Homer saw 
 somebody smiling through her tears he said, on 
 the whole, a commonplace thing, but it touched 
 our feelings for a great many centuries, and I 
 think that in the ' Elegy in a Country Church- 
 yard ' Gray has expressed a simple sentiment, and 
 as long as there are young men and middle-aged 
 men Gray's poem will continue to be read and 
 loved as in the days when it was written. There 
 is a Spanish proverb which rebukes those people 
 who ask something better than bread. Let those 
 who ask for something better get something bet- 
 ter than what Gray produced. For my own part, 
 I ask nothing better. He was, perhaps, the great- 
 est artist in words that English literature has pos- 
 sessed. In conclusion, let me say one word for 
 myself. This will probably be the last occasion 
 on which I shall have the opportunity of address- 
 ing Englishmen in public ; and I wish to express 
 my heartfelt gratitude for the kindness which has 
 surrounded me both in my official and private life, 
 and to say that while I came here as a far-off 
 cousin, I feel you are sending me away as some- 
 thing like a brother." 
 
 The following is the passage in Lord Hough- 
 ton's speech referred to by Mr. Lowell : — 
 
 "It was in 1771 that Dr. Brown wrote a letter 
 
ENGLAND'S FAREWELL TO LOWELL. 211 
 
 which I read in the library of the British Museum. 
 It contains these words : ' Everything is now dark 
 and melancholy in Mr. Gray's rooms. Not a trace 
 of him remains there. But the thoughts I have 
 of him will last and be useful to me in the few 
 years I can expect to live. He never spoke out.' " 
 
 Just before his departure for America, a depu- 
 tation from the " Workmen's Peace Association," 
 headed by Mr. W. R. Cremer, waited upon Mr. 
 Lowell at his official residence, for the purpose of 
 presenting an address to him. 
 
 In reply, Mr. Lowell said : — 
 
 " I have been exceedingly touched latterly by 
 the kindness which I have received here in Eng- 
 land from all classes, but never have I been more 
 profoundly touched than by the deputation which 
 has now waited upon me to express the kind 
 wishes of the English workingmen. I have twice 
 had the pleasure of addressing workingmen since 
 I have been in England, and I have been gratified 
 to find that, among all the audiences to whom I 
 have spoken, there were none more intelligent. 
 They were exceedingly quick to catch all points, 
 and exceedingly agreeable to talk to. You must not 
 think that I have forgotten the part taken by the 
 workingmen of England during our Civil War — I 
 won't say on behalf of the North, because now we 
 
212 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 
 
 are a united people — on the side of good order 
 and freedom, and on the only occasion when I 
 had an opportunity of saying so — that was when 
 speaking to the provincial press in London — I 
 alluded to the subject. I agree with you entirely 
 in the importance of a good understanding, and 
 much more between England and the United 
 States and between the two chief branches of the 
 Anglo-Saxon race. I think you exaggerate a good 
 deal my own merit in relation to anything of that 
 sort, but I have always had a feeling about me that 
 a war between the two countries would be a civil 
 war, and I believe a cordial understanding be- 
 tween them to be absolutely essential, not only 
 to the progress of reasonable liberty, but its pres- 
 ervation and its extension to other races. It is 
 a particular pleasure to me on another account to 
 meet English workmen. I notice that, however 
 ardent they may be in their aspirations, and how- 
 ever theoretical on some points, they are always 
 reasonable. The individual man may set the im- 
 possible before him as something to be obtained, 
 but I think those communities of men have pros- 
 pered the best who have aimed at what is possible. 
 We see daily illustrations of that, and anybody 
 who has studied the history of France would be 
 convinced that though England has a form of 
 
ENGLAND'S FARE WELL TO LO WELL. 2 1 3 
 
 government not so free as that country, yet you 
 have made a greater advance towards good will 
 among men, and towards peace, than France has 
 done. I do not wish you to suppose that I am 
 out of sympathy with what I call the French Rev- 
 olution — although I consider it an enormous mis- 
 fortune which might have been prevented, and 
 France saved from many evil consequences that 
 followed — but the manner in which it took place 
 we ought all to regard. Since I have been in 
 England I have done something, I trust, to pro- 
 mote a cordial feeling between this country and 
 the United States. That has been my earnest 
 desire always, and I hope I have to some extent 
 succeeded. You will allow me to thank you 
 warmly for this address, which I shall always feel 
 to be among my most precious possessions, and 
 I shall carry to the workmen on the other side 
 of the Atlantic the message expressive of your 
 sympathy and hope. I hope the occasion will not 
 ever arise, even for arbitration. I think if we can 
 talk together face to face we shall be able to settle 
 all differences. I am certain that the relations 
 between the two countries are now of a most am- 
 icable and friendly kind, and I am equally sure 
 that my successor is as strongly impressed as I 
 could be with the necessity of strengthening those 
 
2 14 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 
 
 friendly relations. I trust the necessity for arbitra- 
 tion may never arise between us ; I do not think it 
 will. You will again allow me to give you my most 
 hearty and profound thanks for the kindness you 
 have done me, and to wish you all manner of pros- 
 perity. I trust also that that reign of peace to 
 which you allude may come soon and last long. I 
 appreciate extremely what Mr. Cremer said as to 
 your sympathy with the Northern States in the 
 Civil War, with whom no one could help sympa- 
 thizing if they went to the root of the matter. I 
 believe in peace as strongly as any man can do, but 
 I believe also that there are occasions when war is 
 less disastrous than peace ; that there are times 
 when one must resort to what goes before all law, 
 and what, indeed, forms the foundation of it — the 
 law of the strongest ; and that, as a general rule, the 
 strongest deserve to get the best of the struggle. 
 They say, satirically, that God is on the side of the 
 strong battalions, but I think they are sometimes 
 in the right, and my experience goes to prove that. 
 
 " The deputation then withdrew. The address, 
 engrossed on vellum, is is be trasmitted to Mr. 
 Lowell in America." 
 
 The following is the text of the reply of James 
 Russell Lowell to the address forwarded to him 
 by the mayor of Worcester, England : — 
 
ENGLAND'S FAREWELL TO LOWELL. 215 
 
 Mr. Mayor and Gentlemen: — 
 
 While I cannot but feel highly honored by the beautiful proof 
 you have just given me that I am not forgotten by the ever-faith- 
 ful city, I value even more the kindly sentiment which prompted 
 it, and to which you have given such graceful expression. I am 
 well aware that it is to what I represent far more than to any 
 merit of my own that I owe this distinction, and that conscious- 
 ness makes it doubly grateful to me. They who endured exile 
 and danger and every form of hardship to found the great kindred 
 Commonwealth beyond the sea — and what that exile must have 
 been they only can feel who know how beautiful and how justly 
 dear was the land they left — took with them, not only such seeds 
 as would bear good fruit for the body, but those also of many a 
 familiar flower that could serve only as food for sentiment and 
 affection. Yet the most precious germs of all were those of 
 memory and tradition, that had the gift of fernseed to go with 
 them invisibly. They could not forget the land of their birth, nor 
 can we, their descendants, forget the land of their ancestry. They 
 fondly gave the old names to the new hamlets they were planting 
 in the wilderness. The central county of my native State is the 
 namesake of yours. It calls itself proudly the heart of the Com- 
 monwealth, and its beautiful chief city is Worcester. You knew 
 how to touch a cord of tenderest association when, four years ago, 
 you claimed me as of Worcestershire because my forefathers (the 
 Lowells) had been so. You have been pleased, sir, to say that I 
 have done something to strengthen the good feeling between the 
 two great households of the English family. I am glad to think 
 that I in any way deserve this praise, for I look upon that good 
 feeling as of vital interest to the best hopes and aspirations of 
 mankind. I am sure that you will find my excellent successor 
 animated by the same sentiment, and as happy as I have always 
 been, while warmly loyal to the country that is and should be the 
 dearest of all, to recognize those ties of blood, of language, and of 
 
2i6 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 
 
 kindred institutions which make England the next dearest. As 
 for me, sir, the precious gift you have brought me, truly illumin- 
 ated by its charming picture of buildings, some of them dear for 
 their beauty, some because they recall your kindness or that of 
 friends who have made me feel as if, when I went to Worcester, I 
 was going home, is another witness of that universal kindness 
 (may I not say affection ?) by which the land of my fathers has 
 gone near to make me fancy that I was a son rather than a far-oS 
 cousin. As such it will always be justly dear to me and mine. 
 Wishing continued prosperity to the city of Worcester, I remain, 
 etc., 
 
 [Signed] J. R. Lowell. 
 
CHAPTER XIX. 
 
 RETURN TO THE UNITED STATES. 
 
 ON the Sunday afternoon before Lowell sailed 
 for America, a little group of people might 
 have been seen at Euston Station engaged in say- 
 ing good-by to a friend. 
 
 " The American Minister, the two secretaries 
 of the American Legation, Mr. Hoppin and Mr. 
 Henry White, Mr. Alma-Tadema, and a few others 
 composed the little group. The friend who was 
 going away was Mr. Lowell. No announcement 
 of his departure had been made ; hardly any- 
 body knew of it except the few who were there 
 — the very reporters had failed to find it out. 
 Mr. Lowell's tastes do not lead him to seek pub- 
 licity, and nothing could have suited him better 
 than this quiet leave-taking. There was nothing 
 to attract attention, and yet the scene was im- 
 pressive to those who witnessed it. There went 
 the man who for five years has been the foremost 
 American in Europe ; the most popular of Ameri- 
 can Ministers to England ; the man who has done 
 
 217 
 
2i8 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 
 
 more than any other during this period to make 
 his country honored and liked abroad. It is char- 
 acteristic of the English and of Mr. Lowell that his 
 farewell should have been what it was. Neither 
 he nor they like a fuss. The feeling on both sides 
 is as deep as it could have been if the well-meant 
 proposals for a public farewell had been pressed. 
 Mr. Lowell goes to Chester to spend two days 
 with Mr. and Mrs. Tom Hughes, who are among 
 his oldest friends in England. The papers say 
 he stays at Eaton Hall with the Duke of West- 
 minster. The foundation for that story is that the 
 Duke asked him and that Mr. Lowell declined, 
 having long been engaged to Mr. Hughes. Peo- 
 ple in England seem to take it for granted that 
 Mr. Lowell will presently return. The question 
 they ask is not whether he will come back, but 
 when. His last weeks have been spent in making 
 things pleasant for Mr. Phelps ; efforts in which, 
 as I have said before, the English show themselves 
 ready to join with cordiality." 
 
 A foggy night amid icebergs delayed the Cu- 
 narder, Scythia, so that a pleasant reception which 
 a few friends had prepared to give Lowell in 
 Boston did not take place. 
 
 " In coming up the harbor Mr. Lowell talked 
 freely about the crisis in British politics, which 
 
RETURN TO THE UNITED STATES. 2191 
 
 had developed so rapidly since he sailed. ' When 
 I left,' said he, 'things were in a very unsettled 
 condition. I suppose Lord Salisbury is forming a 
 new Cabinet. He is a very able leader and will 
 undoubtedly make a successful ministry, but there 
 is yet much trouble ahead for him. The redistri- 
 bution bill is to be passed, and then there will 
 be a new election. It will be a critical period 
 for him and it is possible that the Liberals may 
 yet secure control of the government. I foresaw 
 the defeat of the Gladstone Ministry some time 
 ago, but the Conservatives will find that they 
 must largely pattern after his policy and give the 
 Irish more than justice demands. He conceded 
 all that was possible. Why, Irish farmers have 
 vastly more advantages than have Scottish or 
 English farmers. They are beginning to see this. 
 This Irish question will be settled peaceably. 
 They are human, as well as the English. About 
 one fourth of them are thoroughly loyal to the 
 government, and a much larger proportion would 
 like to be, but they are overawed by some of their 
 leaders. These Irish leaders are a peculiar peo- 
 ple. They talk for the sake of talking, and do 
 not pay much attention to what they are saying, 
 nor do they stop to consider the effect of their 
 language. I believe Mr. Parnell is thoroughly in 
 
220 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 
 
 earnest and sincere in his efforts in behalf of his 
 countrymen, but many of them are not so earnest. 
 Wealthy Irishmen do not seem to have a very 
 warm attachment for their country. They seem 
 to prefer living in London or Paris. 
 
 '"I do not see how any other policy can ever be 
 adopted toward Ireland. She can never be sepa- 
 rated from England. The natural location of the 
 two countries forbids it. The country that frees 
 Ireland must first conquer England, and then Ire- 
 land would be just as poorly off as her people say 
 she now is. The countries are too close to admit 
 of two different governments. There was much 
 talk about annexing Ireland to the United States, 
 but the absurdity of that idea is plain on its face. 
 Why, all the so-called navy of the United States 
 could not protect her property. I say "so-called," 
 for in reality our country has no navy ; but I don't 
 know but that we are just as well off as though we 
 had an extensive fleet of gunboats. An English 
 naval officer told me only a short time ago that our 
 policy with regard to a navy was, on the whole, 
 the best. "Do not create a navy," said he, "until 
 you need it, and then build your vessels with all 
 the latest modern improvements." I do not know 
 but that he is right. Of course it would take a 
 little time and would cause an enormous outlay of 
 
RETURN TO THE UNITED STATES. 221 
 
 money. I don't think, however, that we shall be 
 called upon to use a navy against England right 
 away. The relations between the two countries 
 could not be more pleasant or friendly, yet war is 
 not an impossibility. We have English blood in 
 our veins, and we have just as much English pride 
 as those across the water. Neither country would 
 consent to be bulldozed, but that is not likely to 
 occur. The policy that has been maintained be- 
 tween the two countries is, I think, the wisest that 
 . could be pursued, and I am confident that my suc- 
 cessor will do just right. Mr. Phelps is a man of 
 great ability. Personally he is one of the pleasant- 
 est gentlemen I ever met. I am sure that the inter- 
 ests of our country will not suffer in his hands.' 
 
 " Mr. Lowell thought that Lord Salisbury would 
 also ' carry out Mr. Gladstone's policy concerning 
 the Anglo-Russian dispute. He is of the war 
 party, but now that the responsibility rests upon 
 his shoulders he will be very careful how he in- 
 volves the whole continent of Europe in a war, for 
 that is what a declaration of war between England 
 and Russia would mean. I have never thought 
 from the first that there would be war. I see that 
 much was said about its probable effect upon trade 
 in our country, but it would not have been so ad- 
 vantageous as has been supposed-" 
 
222 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 
 
 "The change in the Ministry would have wrought 
 no change in the relations of Mr. Lowell to the 
 English Government. ' I could not have been 
 more pleasantly situated,' said he. 'Had it not 
 been for the change in my family relations I should 
 probably have staid in England. There is nothing 
 but English blood in my veins, and I have often 
 remarked that I was just as much an Englishman 
 as they were.' 
 
 " Soon after the boat was made fast to the pier, 
 Mr. and Mrs. Edward Burnett, Mr. Lowell's son- 
 in-law and daughter, greeted him, and then the 
 party took a carriage for Mr. Lowell's sister's 
 residence in Boston." 
 
CHAPTER XX. 
 
 THE "WELCOME HOME. 
 
 THE "Literary World" of Boston devoted its 
 issue of June 27, 1885, to "A Welcome to 
 Lowell," and the following poems and letters are 
 some of the contributions to its columns. John 
 G. Whittier sent a characteristic poem full of 
 loving welcome : — 
 
 " Take our hands, dear Russell Lowell ; 
 
 Our hearts are all thy own. 
 To-day we bid thee welcome 
 
 Not for ourselves alone. 
 
 " In the long years of thy absence 
 
 Some of us have grown old. 
 And some have passed the portals 
 
 Of the Mystery untold ; 
 
 " For the hands that cannot clasp thee, 
 
 For the voices that are dumb. 
 For each and all I bid thee 
 
 A grateful welcome home I 
 
 223 
 
224 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 
 
 " For Cedarcroft's sweet singer 
 
 To the nine-fold Muses dear ; 
 For the Seer the winding Concord 
 
 Paused by his door to hear ; 
 
 " For him who, to the music 
 
 Of the hemlock and the pine 
 Set the old and tender story 
 
 Of the lorn Evangeline ; 
 
 " And for him the three-hilled city 
 
 Shall hold in memory long, 
 Whose name is the hint and token 
 
 Of the pleasant Fields of Song \ 
 
 " For the old friends unforgotten, 
 For the young thou hast not known, 
 
 I speak their heart-warm greeting : 
 Come back and take thy own I 
 
 " From England's royal farewells. 
 
 And honors fitly paid, 
 Come back, dear Russell Lowell, 
 
 To Elmwood's waiting shade I 
 
 " Come home with all the garlands 
 
 That crown of right thy head. 
 I speak fcr comrades living, 
 
 I speak for comrades dead ! " 
 
 From Newport, R. I., George Bancroft sent the 
 following : — 
 
THE WELCOME HOME. 
 
 225 
 
 "From my heart I join in giving a welcome to 
 James Russell Lowell on his return home. In his 
 long absence he has established himself in the 
 esteem of the two great nations to which he has 
 been successively accredited, and has retained the 
 confidence and affection of his own countrymen. 
 During his residence in Great Britain, he has had 
 the opportunity of observing its government man- 
 ifest the seemingly fixed policy, for these and for 
 coming years, of establishing peace and friendship 
 with us on the principle of reciprocal justice and 
 equality ; as he plants his foot on his native soil, 
 he will discern an ever-increasing moderation in 
 the American mind, manifested by the desire to 
 develop the resources of our empire rather than 
 to enlarge its bounds. 
 
 " Men like Lowell the country can spare but a 
 season for a foreign field of labor ; here, in our 
 own great land, higher and nobler duties affecting 
 the character- of the nation crowd upon them with 
 the surest promises of gladdening returns. If the 
 great republic is bound, as Emerson taught, to ex- 
 hibit in its life the beautiful as well as the true 
 and the just, our ablest critic must strengthen the 
 artist in resisting the tendency to substitute costly 
 and often useless and trivial details for the gran- 
 deur of simplicity. He must ajpplaud the people 
 
226 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 
 
 as it claps its hands for joy at the rapid triumphs 
 of science and the swift application of them to the 
 business of life ; but it is more especially his high 
 office to give help to the republic in receiving as 
 its own citizens the great philosophers and poets 
 of all time, from the days of Isaiah and Homer to 
 our own. 
 
 " Our friend brings back with him his own noble- 
 ness of nature and activity of mind. Let us wish 
 for him health and a late return to the skies, with 
 intervening years of happiness and honor." 
 
 Oliver Wendell Holmes furnished the following 
 characteristic tribute : — 
 
 TO J. R. L. HOMEWARD BOUND. 
 
 " [Brave Bird o' freedom] what a sight it were 
 To see thee in our waters yet appeare 
 [After] those flights upon the banks of Thames 
 That so did talce [all England with] our James." 
 
 Ben Johnson in memory of Shakespeare, 
 Adapted by O. W. H. 
 
 From the Craigie House, Cambridge, wrote 
 Samuel Longfellow : — 
 
 " I should be sorry indeed if, among the voices 
 of greeting with which the Literary World salutes 
 Mr. Lowell's return, there should be no word from 
 that Craigie House where for so many years he 
 
THE WELCOME HOME. 
 
 227 
 
 was a frequent, welcome, and delightful guest ; 
 even though the tongue that should have given 
 that welcome, as it gave the farewell, is silent 
 now. 
 
 "The cordial relation between the poets of 
 Craigie House and Elmwood is known to all read- 
 ers. Thirty-seven years ago, when Mr. Lowell 
 wrote that piece of keen and frolic criticism, the 
 ' Fable for Critics,' his steel became a swan's 
 quill while he spoke of the author of ' Evange- 
 line ; ' to whom, indeed, he had read some of the 
 other passages of this poem in the manuscript." 
 
 In 1867, on Mr. Longfellow's sixtieth birthday, 
 it was Mr. Lowell's initials that were signed to the 
 salutation that appeared in the morning " Adver- 
 tiser " of February 27 : — 
 
 TO H. W. L. 
 
 " I need not praise the sweetness of his song 
 
 Where limpid verse to limpid verse succeeds 
 Smootli as our Charles, when fearing lest he wrong 
 The new moon's mirrored skiff, he slides along 
 Full without noise, and whispers in his reeds. 
 
 " With loving breath of all the winds his name 
 Is blown about the world, but to his friends 
 A sweeter secret hides behind his fame 
 And Love steals shyly through the loud acclaim 
 To murmur a God bless you I and there ends." 
 
228 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 
 
 And it was the hand of Mr. Lowell, as minister to 
 Spain, that transmitted to his friend the announce- 
 ment and the diploma, of his election as member 
 of the Spanish Academy. 
 
 " And so it was, when the soft moonlight that 
 had illuminated the halls of Elmwood passed into 
 sorrowful eclipse, at the same time that a new 
 light was kindled in the other home, that Mr. Long- 
 fellow wrote 'The Two Angels.' Later on, lean- 
 ing upon the Elmwood gate, he bade the herons 
 wing his messages of friendship. And when, in 
 still later years, he had finished his translation of 
 the Divina Comedia, and called in a few Dante- 
 lovers on Wednesday evenings that he might read 
 to them the proof-sheets for final criticism and 
 suggestion, Mr. Lowell was one of the first three 
 of that little club, and must often have been the 
 life of the modest supper which closed those even- 
 ings. 
 
 " Of things more intimate nothing need be said 
 here. I have spoken only of that friendship for 
 so many years unclouded and unbroken, in which 
 each so heartily rejoiced in the work and the fame 
 of the other, and which will always hover around 
 threshold and study in Craigie House and Elm- 
 .wood." 
 
THE WELCOME HOME. 229 
 
 Rose Terry Cooke became the amanuensis of 
 Hosea in the following witty lines : — 
 
 "HOSEA BIGELOW'S WELCOME TO J. R. L." 
 
 " He's comin' back from 'crost the sea, 
 The feller 't writ such yarns 'bout me, 
 I swan ! I'm pleased : for he's the beater 
 For rhymin' on't, of every cretur. 
 Leastways of all the ones I know : 
 Them kind on every bush don't grow. 
 Land ! how them fat old British fellers, 
 That think they blow creation's bellers. 
 Must be'n put out, when sech as he 
 Lit down amongst 'em, an' they see. 
 He knowed sech lots, an' was so spry, 
 They couldn't beat him, ef they'd try ! 
 It done me good, I tell ye thet ; 
 To see him brush his hat, an' set 
 Amongst them lords, an' dukes, an' t' others 
 Jest tho' as they was men an' brothers 
 So cherk, and cute, an' full 0' thunder 
 It made them lords an' ladies wonder. 
 For hain't they always thought a Yankee 
 Wa'n't skercely worth a sayin' ' thankee ? ' 
 Hooray ! I say : my hat's a swingin'. 
 Here comes the man to run our singin' ! 
 He's one that shows what Boston means 
 A raisin' folks on rye an' beans. 
 I tell ye, brains is worth the growin'. 
 It's them that makes the biggest showin'. 
 An' when our folks gets up an' hollers. 
 
5 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 
 
 'Tain't always 'bout almighty dollars. 
 
 We go for sense, an' pluck, an' grit, 
 
 Set off an' clamped with mother-wit ; 
 
 We Stan' by him that Stan's by us. 
 
 That ain't no limp slab-sided cuss. 
 
 But such a man as heaven created, 
 
 An' airth tried hard before she mated. 
 
 So give him welcome as we'd oughter ; 
 
 He done us proud acrost the water. 
 
 But let's put in one sly old lick, 
 
 About his varsifyin' trick. 
 
 Say ! now you've done with courts an' couriers. 
 
 An' gi'n the go-by to reporters, 
 
 Do, for the land's sake I take that pen 
 
 That comes so handy, and agen 
 
 Huddup that flyin' boss you bridled, 
 
 When for the rest he r'ared an' sidled. 
 
 Blow your old trumpet like a trooper. 
 
 An' take them gals up on the crouper. 
 
 The Nine that rode your pillion, arter 
 
 I come from playin' a spell at slarter. 
 
 We're tired of putterin' nonsense rhymin', 
 
 We want to hear the great bell chimin'. 
 
 You're welcome hum, old friend ; you know it. 
 
 You're welcomer our biggest poet I 
 
 An' I dono whose heart beats loudest 
 
 Amongst our lovin'est an' proudest. 
 
 But in the hull, I'll bet you'll see 
 
 There ain't none truer than 
 
 HOSEE. 
 
 E. C. Stedman wrote from New York : — 
 
 " Our most ideal poet and man of letters is so 
 
THE WELCOME HOME. 
 
 231 
 
 eminent that others of his guild, in hastening to 
 honor him, seem to be gaining honor for them- 
 selves. Besides, Mr. Lowell's own convictions 
 always have been worth far more to him than the 
 aura popularis. 
 
 " For once, however, he must consent, with re- 
 spect to the welcome and plaudits that greet him 
 here — in which our letters show how heartily 
 American writers take part — to enjoy it all in 
 the spirit of his own caucus orator. Of all speak- 
 ers, poets, diplomats, he surely has the best right 
 at this moment to declare frankly : — 
 
 " ' I thank ye, my frien's, for the warmth o' your greetin' : 
 Ther' 's few airthly blessin's but wut's vain an' fleetin' ; 
 Ef ther' 's one thet (this time) hain't no cracks an' flaws, 
 An' is worth goin' in for, it's pop'lar applause.' " 
 
 J. T. Trowbridge sent the following tribute : — 
 " Americans may well be proud to welcome 
 home their countryman, whose force of talent, wit, 
 and culture have not only stood the test of con- 
 tact with what is best and brightest in Old World 
 character and manners, but have shone with added 
 lustre in their presence." 
 
 Ex-President Hayes wrote as follows from his 
 Ohio home : — 
 
232 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 
 
 " Lowell has conferred such honor upon his 
 country that all Americans will gladly unite in the 
 ' Well Done ' that greets him from every quar- 
 ter, on his return to his home." 
 
 Will Carleton takes Hosea by the hand in the 
 following happy lines : — 
 
 " With love not even he could wake, 
 
 Save in his fatherland, 
 We reach a Yankee grasp, and take 
 
 Hosea by the hand I 
 With smiles of praise that need must throng 
 
 With sympathizing tears, 
 We greet our prince of prose and song, 
 
 In his maturer years ; 
 For words that made a shining track 
 
 Beyond the Atlantic foam, 
 We lift our hearts, and welcome back 
 
 Our statesman to his home ! " 
 
 "The only drawback," wrote Charles Dudley 
 Warner, "to our enthusiastic welcome of Mr. 
 Lowell home is that we cannot have him in Eng- 
 land. But I think that our love will easily get 
 the better of our national vanity. It used to be 
 said of some of the New England folk, whom Mr. 
 Lowell has described better than anybody else, 
 that they only ate such farm produce as they could 
 not sell. I hope we are past that stage of our de- 
 
THE WELCOME HOME. 233 
 
 velopment, and that we are able to keep as well as 
 appreciate the best product of our civilization. 
 
 " I will not go so far as to say that we need Mr. 
 Lowell now as much as the English need him, but 
 we have spared him long enough, and the English 
 must get along as well as they can. His stay 
 abroad has been sufficient in time to show Europe 
 what the real American is at his best, and we 
 should now have a chance to show him that a 
 democratic republic, of which he has been an un- 
 flinching representative, is not ungrateful to him. 
 
 " While the country at large rises up to wel- 
 come his return, and to honor the patriot and 
 scholar who has done as much as any man in his 
 generation to give us cosmopolitan dignity among 
 nations, it is peculiarly the business of the world 
 of letters to hail him and crown him. We shall 
 have to go back to the ambassadors of the Grecian 
 States for any parallel to his career as the repre- 
 sentative of the nobility and importance of litera- 
 ture in the affairs of life. His influence has not 
 only made two allied people feel more strongly 
 their kinship, but he has lifted Letters, in the 
 presence of the world, into its proper place. And 
 I am sure that his service in this respect will en- 
 dure in memory longer than the temporary honor 
 of his merely official life. 
 
234 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 
 
 " As one of the million writers I thank you for 
 the privilege of extending to Mr. Lowell a most 
 hearty welcome." 
 
 L. V. Cole of South Williamstown, Mass, sent 
 " The Mother's Welcome " : — 
 
 " New England, the mother, grew silent one day 
 
 And sat in a thoughtful mood ; 
 ' I wonder,' at last she seemed to say 
 
 With a sigh that I understood, 
 
 ' I wonder what has become of the voice 
 
 I used so often to hear, 
 Clear-toned and, in its utterance, choice ; 
 
 I miss it this many a year. 
 
 ' It wandered among the trees I bear, 
 
 This beautiful voice and true. 
 Here Under the Willows, or Old Elm there, 
 
 In Birch-tree and Pine-tree too I 
 
 ' And in loftier air, with wings more strong, 
 
 It soared I remember how 1 
 But why is the silence so deep and long ? 
 
 Has my child forgotten me now ? ' 
 
 ' Dear mother,' I cried, for the news that day 
 Had flashed from the sea to the town, 
 
 ' You would better put wonder and trouble away, 
 And get out your holiday gown I 
 
THE WELCOME HOME. 235 
 
 ' Somebody is coming whom you would greet, 
 
 And who wears fresh laurels from men ; 
 His heart, it is said, outruns his feet — 
 
 May he sing for your glory again I ' 
 
 The fond old mother, with joy in her tone 
 And a bounding heart in her breast, 
 
 Has welcomed the singer back to his throne 
 In the land he still loves best." 
 
 From three of our American colleges came the 
 following greetings : — 
 
 OUR POET-AMBASSADOR. 
 
 If my voice of welcome can add anything to the general acclaim 
 that will greet the return of our poet-ambassador, Mr. Lowell, I 
 gladly send it. I know of no instance, ancient or modern, of an 
 equal combination of poetical power and eminence with the suc- 
 cessful administration of high national and political trusts. He 
 has delighted and honored us, and we honor ourselves in honor- 
 ing him. 
 
 Mark Hopkins. 
 
 Williams College, June 15, 1885. 
 
 THE SCHOLAR IN POLITICS. 
 
 I heartily join in the welcome which Mr. Lowell will receive on 
 his return. His splendid diplomatic services are another illustra- 
 tion of the value of scholarship and literary culture in statesman- 
 ship. Julius H. Seelye. 
 
 Amherst, Mass, June 17, 1885. 
 
236 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 
 
 TO THE HON. JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL, D. C. L. 
 
 Most cordially do I add my words of greeting and welcome to 
 the many which you will hear from so many admirers and friends. 
 As a poet and critic, a gentleman and diplomat, you have honored 
 your country and yourself, and earned the warmest thanks of your 
 fellow-citizens. It is especially gratifying to those who belong to 
 the Commonwealth of Letters, that by your successful administra- 
 tion you have so eminently exemplified the truth that a man of 
 letters is not necessarily ignorant of affairs, nor unskilled in di- 
 plomacy. Ungenerous yet discriminating criticisms which from 
 time to time you have had occasion to utter have demonstrated to 
 our English cousins that while we read the best of their writers 
 with the warmest enthusiasm, our admiration is tempered by dis- 
 criminating insight. Many of the wise and friendly words which 
 you have spoken on English soil will long be remembered in the 
 many American homes to which you will always be welcome, 
 more than ever, as you return after an absence of so many years 
 — an absence brightened with cheerful sunshine, though shaded 
 with sacred sorrow. 
 
 Noah Porter. 
 
 New Haven, Conn., June 17 1885. 
 
 Wiliam Everett sent the following " Sonnet " : — 
 
 " Lowell, of worthy sires the worthy son, 
 
 At length restored from Albion and from Spain, 
 And bringing every charm of life again, 
 
 Except that dearest, to her giver gone — 
 
 How should love hail thee ? in what richer tone 
 Renew the music of her slumbering strain. 
 Hushed, while thy clarion sounded o'er the main 
 
 Peal after peal, for each new glory won ? 
 
 Be thanked for all 1 But chief, that while on high 
 
THE WELCOME HOME. 237 
 
 Thy country's starry banner thou didst bear 
 Till Briton and Iberian bowed the knee, 
 Thy golden words taught their enlightened eye 
 
 Themselves to read in sparkling mirror there, 
 And their own honors better know, through thee." 
 
 Oliver Johnson, " a survivor of the great strug- 
 gle," wrote : — 
 
 " As one of the few survivors of the great anti- 
 slavery struggle, to which James Russell Lowell 
 gave the earliest fruits of his genius, and in grateful 
 memory of the help he gave when help was most 
 needed, I gladly lend my feeble voice to bid him 
 welcome now upon his return from the mother 
 country, where his distinguished services as the 
 representative of the American republic have re- 
 flected the highest honor upon his countrymen 
 and himself." 
 
 Lucy Larcom "hopes he has come back to 
 sing " : — 
 
 "Are we not all glad indeed of Mr. Lowell's 
 return to his own country and ours .' We have 
 missed him every year when the cat-birds and 
 bobolinks renewed their May-time music, when 
 buttercups and dandelions spread their cloth of 
 gold upon the lawns, and when birch-leaves began 
 to ripple in breeze and sunshine. 
 
 "We cannot do without one who is so essentially 
 
238 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 
 
 and pervasively our poet of poets, and we do hope 
 he has come back to sing'' 
 
 Wrote Bradford Torrey : — 
 
 " If I am to have any part in the proposed wel- 
 come to Mr. Lowell, it must be as standing for the 
 great body of his readers and friends, who remain 
 to him unknown. We know hint, at all events, 
 and are glad to have him back again with us, 
 proud as we have been of his representation of us 
 abroad. May he live long, to write poems, critical 
 essays, narratives of travel, and whatever else his 
 genius may direct • — only (may I say it i") let him 
 not too often fall into the vein of My Garden 
 Acquaintance, lest some of the rest of us find our 
 occupation gone." 
 
 " A hearty welcome home " is sent in the fol- 
 lowing letter: — 
 
 Thanks for the privilege you accord me of joining to give voice 
 to the hearty welcome home with which the whole country greets 
 Mr. Lowell, all the more hearty because we feared that the unequal 
 social attractions of our great Mother-land, who has taken him so af- 
 fectionately to her bosom, would prevail over the ties -:— ah, how 
 many of them have broken — which bind him to us. With what 
 a ringing word of welcome would he have been greeted by Emer- 
 son, who felt we could not spare him, and mourned to me over 
 his long absence from his native land. 
 
 W. H. FURNESS. 
 Wallingford, Ddaiaare Co., Pa., June l8, 18S5. 
 
THE WELCOME HOME. 239 
 
 And from the South came two characteristic 
 greetings : — 
 
 TO JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 
 
 When home returned the Roman conqueror, 
 It was with trumpet's blare and loud acclaim, 
 On his haught brow the bloody laurel of Fame, 
 
 With spoils of realms, and kings subdued in war. 
 
 Not in such guise we welcome you once more, 
 Who come from peaceful victory, void of blame, 
 Whom license dare not taunt with words of shame — 
 
 The Statesman, Scholar, Poet, Orator. 
 
 We honor you as one who never swerves 
 
 From the just rule of what is right and true — 
 At home — abroad — in whatso station placed — 
 
 And one who well his country ever serves, 
 But best in song. Though fourfold wreaths be due, 
 Yet with the ivy are you fitliest graced. 
 
 W. L. Shoemaker. 
 Georgetown, D. C.,June 15, 1885. 
 
 A VOICE FROM VIRGINIA. 
 
 I am glad to join the welcome and friendly greeting you purpose 
 offering to Mr. Lowell on his return. 
 
 His eminence in letters and the distinction which he has ac- 
 quired as our representative abroad certainly entitle him to this 
 mark of respect and regard ; and I cordially add my small word 
 
 to the many congratulations he will receive from his countrymen. 
 
 J. ESTEN COOKE. 
 The Briars, Boyce, Va.,June, 15, 1885. 
 
 I 
 
 There were numerous other contributions to this 
 
240 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 
 
 hearty "Welcome to Lowell," and all from well- 
 known names in literature. From some of them 
 we have quoted elsewhere in the book, as, for 
 instance, in Dr. Bartol's tribute, a part of which is 
 printed in the opening chapter. 
 
CHAPTER XXI. 
 
 VARIOUS ADDRESSES. 
 
 NOT long after his return home, Lowell was 
 invited to address the annual literary 
 gathering at Sanderson Academy, Ashfield, Mass. 
 His life-long friend, Charles Eliot Norton, pre- 
 sided at the festival and introduced the speaker in 
 his own eloquent and polished manner, closing 
 with these words : " On our futile laurels he looks 
 down, himself our highest crown." 
 
 Lowell was received with long and hearty ap- 
 plause, and spoke as follows : — 
 
 "I cannot easily escape from some strength of 
 emotion in listening to the words of my friend who 
 has just sat down, unless I receive it on the shield 
 which has generally been my protection against 
 many of the sorrows and some of the hardships of 
 life. I mean the shield of humor, and I shall, 
 therefore, take less seriously than playfully the 
 portrait that he has been kind enough to draw of 
 me. It reminds me of a story I once heard of a 
 young poet who published his volume of verses, 
 
 241 
 
242 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 
 
 and prefixed to it his own portrait, drawn by a 
 friendly artist. The endeavor of his life from that 
 time forward was to look like the portrait that his 
 friend had drawn. I shall make the same en- 
 deavor. It is a great pleasure to me to come here 
 to-day, not only because I have met some of the 
 oldest friends of my life, but also that after having 
 looked in the eyes of so many old English audi- 
 ences I see face to face a new English one, and 
 when I looked at them I was reminded of a family 
 likeness and of that kinship of blood which unites us. 
 When I look at you I see many faces that remind 
 me of faces I saw on the other side of the water, 
 and I feel that whether I speak there or here I 
 am essentially speaking to one people. I have 
 been struck, since I came back, with some remarks. 
 I am not going to talk about myself, and I am not 
 going to make a speech. I have spoken so often 
 for you on the other side of the water, that I feel 
 as though I had a certain claim, at least, to be put 
 on the retired list. But I could not fail to observe 
 a certain distrust of America that has peeped out 
 in remarks made, sometimes in the newspapers, 
 sometimes to myself, as to whether a man could 
 live eight years out of America without really pre- 
 ferring . Europe. It seems to me to imply what I 
 should call a very unworthy distrust in the powers 
 
VARIOUS ADDRESSES. 
 
 243 
 
 of America to inspire affection. I feel to-day in 
 looking in your faces somewhat as I did when I 
 took my first walk over the hills after my return, 
 and the tears came into my eyes as I was wel- 
 comed by the familiar wayside flowers, the trees, 
 the birds that had been my earliest friends. It 
 seems to me that those who take such a view quite 
 miscalculate the force of the affection that a man 
 feels for his country. It is something deeper than 
 a sentiment. If there were anything deeper, I 
 should say it was something deeper than an in- 
 stinct. It is that feeling of self-renunciation and 
 of identification with another, which Ruth ex- 
 pressed when she said, ' Entreat me not to leave 
 thee, nor to depart from following after thee, for 
 whither thou goest I will go ; where thou livest I 
 will live, and where thou diest there will I die 
 also.' That, it seems to me, is the instinctive 
 feeling that a man has. 
 
 " At the same time, this does not exclude the hav- 
 ing clear eyes to see the faults of one's country. 
 I think that, as an old president of Harvard Col- 
 lege once said to a person who was remonstrating 
 with him for speaking hardly of one of whom he 
 had a very ill opinion, 'But charity, doctor, char- 
 ity.' ' Yes, I know ; but charity has eyes and 
 ears, and won't be made a fool of.' I notice a 
 
244 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 
 
 good many changes in coming home, a few of 
 which I may, perhaps, be allowed to touch upon. 
 I notice a great growth in luxury, inevitable, I sup- 
 pose, and which may have good in it — more good, 
 perhaps, then I can see. I notice also one change 
 that has impressed me profoundly, and when I 
 hear that New England is drawing away, I cannot 
 help thinking to myself how much more prosper- 
 ous the farms look than they did when I was 
 young ; how much more neat is the farming ; how 
 much greater the attention to what will please the 
 eye about the farm, as the planting of flowers and 
 trimming the grass, which seems to me a very 
 good sign. I had an opportunity, by a strange 
 accident, of becoming very intimate with the out- 
 ward appearance of New England during my 
 youth by going about when a little boy with my 
 father when he went on exchanges. He always 
 went in his own vehicle, and he sometimes drove 
 as far west as Northampton. I do not wish to de- 
 tain you on this point, except as it intereated me 
 and is now first in my mind. While I was in Eng- 
 land I had occasion once to address them on the 
 subject of Democracy, and I could not help think- 
 ing when I came up here that I was coming to 
 one of its original sources, for certain it is, that in 
 the village community of New England, in its 
 
VARIOUS ADDRESSES. 345 
 
 'plain living and high thinking,' began that 
 social equality which afterwards developed on the 
 political side into what we call democracy. And 
 democracy — while surely we cannot claim for it 
 that it is perfect — yet democracy, it seems to me, 
 is the best expedient hitherto invented by mankind, 
 not for annihilating distinctions and inequahties, 
 for that is impossible, but so far as it is humanly 
 possible, for compensating them. Here in our 
 little towns early in the last century, people met 
 without thinking of it on a high tableland of com- 
 mon manhood. There was no sense of presump- 
 tion from below, there was no possibility of 
 condescension from above, because there was no 
 above or below in the community. Learning was 
 always respected in the clergyman, in the doctor, 
 in the squire, the justice of the peace and the rest 
 of the community. This made no artificial dis- 
 tinction. I observe also that our people are get- 
 ting over their very bad habit with regard to 
 politics, for democracy, you must remember, lays 
 a heavier burden on the individual conscience than 
 any other form of government ; and I have been 
 glad to observe that we have been getting over 
 that habit of thinking that our institutions will go 
 of themselves. Now it seems to me that there is 
 no machine of human construction, or into which 
 
246 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 
 
 the wit of man has entered that can go of itself 
 without supervision, without oiling ; that there are 
 no wheels that will revolve without our help ex- 
 cept the great wheel of the constellations or that 
 great circle of the sun's, which has its hand upon 
 the dial plate, and which was made by a hand 
 much less fallible than ours. It also pleases me 
 very much to see a friend, whose constancy, whose 
 faith and whose courage have done so much more 
 than any other man's to bring about that reform, 
 though when I speak of civil-service reform, the 
 friend who stands at our elbow on all these occa- 
 sions will suggest to me a certain parallel, that is, 
 that as Mr. Curtis is here to-day, and I am here 
 to-day, ic reminds one of the temperance lecturer 
 who used to go about carrying with him an un- 
 happy person as the awful example, and it may 
 have flickered before some of your minds that I 
 was the ' awful example ' of the very reform I 
 had preached. However, I say that it is to me a 
 very refreshing thing to find that this old happy- 
 go-lucky feeling about our institutions has a very 
 good chance of passing away. 
 
 " One thing which always impressed me on the 
 other side of the water as an admirable one, and 
 as one which gave them a certain advantage over 
 us, is the number of men who train themselves 
 
VARIOUS ADDRESSES. 
 
 247 
 
 specifically for politics, for government. We are 
 apt to forget, over here, that the art of govern- 
 ing men, as it is the highest, so it is the most 
 difficult, of all arts. We are particular how our 
 boots are made, but about our constitutions we 
 ' trust in the Lord,' without even, as Cromwell 
 advised, keeping our powder dry. We commit the 
 highest destinies of this republic, which some 
 of us hope bears the hope of the world in her 
 womb — to whom ? Certainly not always to those 
 who are most fit on any principle of natural selec- 
 tion ; certainly sometimes to those who are most 
 unfit on any principle of selection, — and this is 
 a very serious matter, for, if you will allow me to 
 speak with absolute plainness, no country that 
 allows itself to be governed for a moment by its 
 blackguards is safe. That was written before the 
 United States of America existed. It is one of 
 the truths of human nature and of destiny. If I 
 were a man who had any political aspiration — 
 which, thank heaven, I have not — if I had any 
 official aspiration — which, thank heaven, also, I 
 have not — I should come home here, and when 
 I first met an American audience I should say to 
 them, • My friends, America can learn nothing of 
 Europe ; Europe must come to school here. You 
 have the tallest monument, you have the biggest 
 
248 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 
 
 waterfall, you have the highest tariff of any country 
 in the world.' I would tell you that the last cen- 
 sus showed that you had gained so many millions, 
 as if the rabbits did not beat us in that way of 
 multiplication, as if it counted for anything ! It 
 seems to me that what we make of our several 
 millions is the vital question for us. 
 
 " I was very much interested in what Professor 
 Stanley Hall said. I am heretic enough to have 
 doubted whether our common schools are the 
 panacea we have been inclined to think them. I 
 was exceedingly interested in what he said about 
 the education which a boy gained on the hills 
 here. It seems to me we are going to fall back 
 into the easy belief that because our common 
 schools teach more than they used — and in my 
 opinion much more than they ought — we can dis- 
 pense with the training of the household. When 
 Mr. Harrison was telling us of the men who were 
 obliged to labor without hope from one end of 
 the day to the other and one end of the year to 
 the other, he added what is quite true — that per- 
 haps, after all, they are happier than that very 
 large class of men who have leisure without cul- 
 ture, and whose sole occupation is either the killing 
 of game or the killing of time — that is, the killing 
 of the most valuable possession that we have." 
 
VARIOUS ADDRESSES. 
 
 249 
 
 At the Class Day dinner at Harvard College, 
 Oliver Wendell Holmes read a complimentary poem 
 to James Russell Lowell, one verse of which runs 
 as follows : — 
 
 " But what deep magic, what alluring arts 
 
 Our Truthful James led captive British hearts | 
 
 Whether his shrewdness made their Statesmen halt, 
 
 Or if his bearing found their dons at fault, 
 
 Or if his virtue was a strange surprise 
 
 Like honest Yankees we can simply guess ; 
 
 England herself will be the first to claim 
 
 Her only conqueror since the Normans came. " 
 
 To this the " London Punch " amicably re- 
 plies : — 
 
 " Not halting Statesmen and not dons outdone, 
 
 Taught us to love this lord of sense and fun ; 
 
 Nor did it come to us as a surprise 
 
 To find a Yankee virtuous as wise. 
 
 No, Holmes, Sweet Holmes ! Our pride it nothing shames 
 
 To own us conquered by your Truthful James. 
 
 His ' sword and spear ' in truth were cause of it, 
 
 The sword of eloquence, the spear of wit ! 
 
 For heart, not art, sage head, not iron hand 
 
 Made him the ' conqueror ' of our stubborn land. 
 
 Captured us ? Yes ! and he'll be hailed with rapture 
 
 If he'll come back among us to recapture ! 
 
 Could you come too, tant mieux ! for what more pat 
 
 Than to pair ' Conqueror ' with ' Autocrat ' ? 
 
 Verb : saf : dear OLIVER ! It won't be lost on 
 
 One of the best and brightest brains in Boston 1 " 
 
250 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 
 
 At the " Concord Celebration " Lowell made 
 the following happy remarks : — 
 
 " Had the early settlers possessed all the fore- 
 sight with which Governor Robinson credited them, 
 they could not have foreseen his making a speech 
 here this day. His old friend, Judge Hoar, had 
 assured him that if he came nothing was expected 
 of him ; and on that assurance he had come to 
 Concord. Now Judge Hoar informed him that he 
 had not been expected to deliver a poem. In ris- 
 ing to address a Concord audience his memory 
 travelled back nearly fifty years. Not an adopted 
 son of Concord, he was in his youth ' bound out ' 
 for a time to Concord, and was most kindly used. 
 In other words, while in his senior year at Har- 
 vard he was rusticated at Concord. To that rus- 
 tication he felt that he owed much, for there he 
 first became acquainted with Emerson. A flighty 
 and exceedingly youthful boy, he was yet readily 
 impressed by Emerson, whom he recalled much as 
 Dante recalled his teacher, Brunetto Latini, ' that 
 dear and good paternal spirit,' who taught how 
 man makes himself eternal. 
 
 "Advertingto Concord's historic past, Mr. Lowell 
 said that the men of Concord made war with a far- 
 reaching result, if not purpose, and from the hour 
 when they marched to the North Bridge had flowed 
 
VARIOUS ADDRESSES. 
 
 251 
 
 the greatest results. Yet it might be doubted 
 whether they fully appreciated their action. The 
 leader who that day said, ' We will march across 
 our own bridge,' made as good a declaration of 
 independence as could be drawn up ; and yet he 
 did not declare all. For not only did those minute 
 men march across their own bridge, but democracy 
 in its most beautiful form marched over the bridge 
 and entered into the field of cosmopolitan politics. 
 That day was what the nation owed to Concord 
 politically. Turning to the country's, the world's 
 literary debt to Concord, we find in the contempo- 
 raneous residences of Emerson, Hawthorne and 
 Thoreau a most remarkable fact. As Concord 
 fired the shot heard round the world, to which we 
 owe our political independence, so we owe to 
 Emerson, more than any other, our intellectual 
 independence. With him we first ceased to be 
 provincial. Hawthorne taught us the great and 
 needed lesson that in our own past there is an 
 ample storehouse for works of imagination and 
 fancy. Thoreau's teaching was that Nature is 
 as friendly and inspiring here as in Wordsworth's 
 country or anywhere else. If we have stars enough 
 — which he sometimes doubted — to make a whole 
 constellation of Orion, then in these three men of 
 Concord, we have those three eminent stars which 
 
252 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 
 
 make the belt of Orion. In rising to-day he could 
 not help recalling one of his youthful recollections 
 of Concord. His good tutor was an admirer of 
 John Locke, but sometimes took issue with him. 
 At such times the speaker felt it a duty to take 
 Locke's side. One day the tutor said, ' Locke is 
 certainly wrong when he says the human mind is 
 never without an idea, for my mind is often with 
 out an idea.' He must confess that he sympa- 
 thized with his old tutor when he [Lowell] was first 
 called upon to speak. But, if he had given his 
 hearers no new ideas, he must give them the as- 
 surance that he felt it good to come back here and 
 retemper one's self in this pure spring of American 
 democracy, although in his case the tonic was not 
 needed. He heartily delighted in such occasions 
 as the present as keeping alive the thread of his- 
 toric continuity so important to men, to families, 
 to towns and to nations, in the development of 
 character." 
 
CHAPTER XXII. 
 
 ANECDOTES AND HARVARD ADDRESS. 
 
 A PERSONAL friend who visited Lowell at 
 i^~V his daughter's home in Southborough, 
 Mass., thus describes the delightful surroundings : 
 
 " There are children and cattle and dogs, and 
 long, undisturbed walks over the hills ; and the 
 house itself, built by his son-in-law, Mr. Edward 
 Burnett, is inexpressibly satisfactory within and 
 without. Everything is spacious, easy, airy. A 
 veranda, broken here and there by porches, sur- 
 rounds it. The house appears tall, many-gabled, 
 informal ; the upper stories are covered with scale- 
 shaped shingles ; paint is not used, but a brownish 
 stain, which more resembles the work of nature 
 than of art. Inside, the floors and walls are fin- 
 ished with polished hard wood and painted plaster. 
 There is plenty of light and cheerfulness and no 
 trace anywhere of dust or dinginess. It is in one 
 of the topmost rooms of the house that Mr. Lowell 
 has his study, facing the west. It does not con- 
 tain many books, but most of them have substan- 
 
 253 
 
254 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 
 
 tial bindings. There is a comfortable table or 
 two, some easy chairs, and Portuguese cabinets 
 containing photographs and papers. It is a very 
 different place from the shadowy study at Elm- 
 wood, in Cambridge, with which one's idea of 
 Mr. Lowell is chiefly associated ; and it is proba- 
 bly used more for work than for the leisure and 
 luxury of the scholar. For Mr. Lowell has on 
 hand more work than he can conveniently accom- 
 plish, and this fact may have something to do with 
 his periodical escapes to England. 
 
 Mrs. Burnett, the "little Mabel" of that pa- 
 thetic poem, " The First Snow- Fall " ; bears a 
 resemblance in looks to her distinguished father. 
 Though very quiet, she is a woman of high spirit, 
 and is said to ride to hounds exceedingly well. 
 Indeed, she is noted as one of the best horsewomen 
 in New England. 
 
 " In the course of a dinner at the country place 
 of ex-Minister John Welsh, Mr. Lowell expressed 
 a very high admiration for the Spanish, to whose 
 court he once was minister. For valor, intellectual 
 ability, honesty, and grace and dignity of person, 
 he said, enthusiastically, the Spaniards rank with 
 the best people on the top of the earth. Apropos 
 of the honesty of the common people, he told this 
 anecdote : When he left Madrid and went to Lon- 
 
ANECDOTES AND HARVARD ADDRESS. 
 
 2SS 
 
 don, he brought with him a man-servant who had 
 attended him some years. 
 
 " Afterward, the servant gave Mr. Lowell a sum 
 of money, with a request that it be forwarded to 
 his brother in Spain. Mr. Lowell took the money 
 and offered a receipt, but the servant seemed to 
 be pained by the proceeding, and to consider the 
 tender of the paper a reproach. 
 
 " ' Why,' said he, drawing himself up, ' I am an 
 honest man. I do not want the paper. I would 
 not take advantage of the absence of the paper to 
 cheat you, Senor.' 
 
 " 'But you do not understand,' said the ex-min- 
 ister. ' This is simply a business affair. The paper 
 will protect your interests.' 
 
 " ' No ; my interests are protected.' 
 
 " ' But your brother, then, he would like to see 
 the money accounted for.' 
 
 " ' My brother is an honest man, too.' 
 
 " ' Well, then, I would like you to take the re- 
 ceipt for my own satisfaction.' 
 
 "'You, Senor. Are not you also an honest 
 man } ' 
 
 " Lowell despaired of making the trustful and 
 picturesque Spaniard understand, and forwarded 
 the money as it stood. In a few weeks he re- 
 ceived a letter from his servant's brother, couched 
 
256 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 
 
 in the hyperbole of Spanish politeness, thanking 
 him for the gracious ' gift ' of gold. 
 
 " Mr. Lowell, at the same dinner, said he had 
 mapped out his future life. He will accept no 
 governmental office of any kind, but will give him- 
 self up altogether to literature. He has a great 
 liking for English life, and says he will spend a 
 considerable part of every year in Great Britain ; 
 but, in order that he may not expatriate himself, 
 he will accept no position abroad." 
 
 To the library of Harvard College, Lowell has 
 presented, since his return from Europe, a val- 
 uable collection of between six and seven hundred 
 volumes. "The books are mostly Spanish, with 
 a few English and Italian, and include many that 
 are rare or choice. Besides a long list of valuable 
 works relating to early Spanish and American 
 history, there is a copy of the Editio princeps of 
 Lopez's Chronicle, printed in 1644, and bought in 
 for Mr. Lowell at the Sunderland sale in 1882, 
 of which the Hon. George P. Marsh wrote : ' He 
 that buys it at its weight in gold will make a cheap 
 bargain.' " 
 
 On November 8, 1886 — which was the two 
 hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the foundation 
 of Harvard College — James Russell Lowell, after 
 being introduced by Judge Devens to the vast 
 
ANECDOTES AND HARVARD ADDRESS. 
 
 2S7 
 
 assembly, delivered a stirring oration, from whicfi 
 the following extracts are taken : — 
 
 " It seems an odd anomaly that, while respect 
 for age and deference to its opinions have dimin- 
 ished, and are still sensibly diminishing among us, 
 the relish of antiquity should be more pungent, 
 and the value set upon things, merely because they 
 are old, should be greater in America than any- 
 where else. It is merely a sentimental relish, for 
 ours is a new country in more senses than one, 
 and, like children, when they are fancying them- 
 selves this or that, we have to play very hard in 
 order to believe that we are old. But we like the 
 game none the worse, and multiply our anniver- 
 saries with honest zeal, as if we increased our 
 centuries by the number of events we could con- 
 gratulate ourselves on having happened a hundred 
 years ago. There is something of instinct in this, 
 and it is a wholesome instinct if it serve to quicken 
 our consciousness of the forces that are gathered 
 by duration and continuity ; if it teach us that, 
 ride fast and far as we may, we carry the past on 
 our crupper, as immovably seated there as the 
 black care of the Roman poet. The generations 
 of men are braided inextricably together, and the 
 very trick of our gait may be countless generations 
 older than we. . . . 
 
2s8 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 
 
 " Are we to suppose that these memories were 
 less dear and gracious to the Puritan scholars at 
 whose instigation this college was founded, than 
 to that old Puritan ^who sang in the dim religious 
 light, the long-drawn aisles and fretted vaults, 
 which these memories recalled ? Doubtless all 
 these things were present to their minds, but they 
 were ready to forego them all for the sake of 
 that truth, whereof, as Milton says of himself, they 
 were members incorporate. The pitiful contrast 
 which they must have felt between the carven 
 sanctuaries of learning they had left behind and the 
 wattled fold they were rearing here on the edge 
 of the wilderness, is to me more than tenderly — 
 it is almost sublimely — pathetic. When I think 
 of their unpliable strength of purpose, their fidelity 
 to their ideal, their faith in God and in themselves, 
 I am inclined to say, with Donne, that — 
 
 " ' We are scarce our fathers' shadows cast at noon.' 
 
 " Our past is well-nigh desolate of sesthetic stim- 
 ulus. We have none, or next to none, of these 
 aids to the imagination, of these coigns of vantage 
 for the tendrils of memory or affection. Not one 
 of our older buildings is venerable or will ever be- 
 come so. Time refuses to console them. They all 
 
ANECDOTES AND HARVARD ADDRESS. 
 
 259 
 
 look as though they meant business, and nothing 
 more. And it is precisely because this college 
 meant business — business of the greatest import 
 — and did that business as thoroughly as it might 
 with no means that were not niggardly, except an 
 abundant purpose to do its best, it is precisely 
 for this that we have gathered to-day. We come 
 back hither from the experiences of a richer life 
 as the son who has prospered returns to the house- 
 hold of his youth, to find in its very homeliness a 
 pulse, if not of deeper, certainly of fonder emotion, 
 than any splendor could stir. ' Dear old mother,' 
 we say, ' how charming you are in your plain cap 
 and the drab silk that has been turned again since 
 we saw you ! You were constantly forced to re- 
 mind us that you could not afford to give us this 
 and that which some other boys had, but your dis- 
 cipline and diet were wholesome, and you sent us 
 forth into the world with the sound constitutions 
 and healthy appetites that are bred of simple fare.' 
 " It is good for us to commemorate this home- 
 spun past of ours ; good, in these days of reckless 
 and swaggering prosperity, to remind ourselves 
 how poor our fathers were, and that we celebrate 
 them because for themselves and their children 
 they chose wisdom and understanding and the 
 things that are of God rather than any other 
 
26o JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 
 
 riches. This is our Founders' Day, and we are 
 come together to do honor to them all. First, to 
 the Commonwealth, which laid our corner-stone ; 
 next, to the gentle and godly youth from whom 
 we took our name — himself scarce more than a 
 name — and with them to the countless throng of 
 benefactors, rich and poor, who have built us up 
 to what we are. We cannot do it better than in 
 the familiar words, ' Let us now praise famous 
 men and our fathers that begat us. The Lord 
 hath wrought great glory by them through his 
 great power from the beginning. Leaders of the 
 people by their counsels, and by their knowledge 
 of learning, meet for the people ; wise and elo- 
 quent in their instructions. These be of them that 
 have left a name behind them that their praises 
 might be reported. And some there be which 
 have no memorial, who are perished as though 
 they had never been. But these were merciful 
 men whose righteousness hath not been forgotten. 
 Wilh their seed shall continually remain a good 
 inheritance. Their seed standeth fast and their 
 children for their sakes.' 
 
 " This two hundred and fiftieth anniversary of 
 our college is not remarkable as comm.emorating 
 any venerable length of days. There is hardly a 
 country in Europe that cannot show us universi 
 
ANECDOTES AND HARVARD ADDRESS. 261 
 
 ties that were older than ours now is when ours 
 was but a grammar school with Eaton as master. 
 Bologna, Paris, Oxford were already famous schools 
 when Dante visited them six hundred years ago. 
 We are ancient, it is true, on our own continent, 
 ancient even as compared with several German 
 universities more renowned than we. It is not, 
 then, primarily the longevity of our alma mater 
 upon which we are gathered here to congratulate 
 her and each other. Kant says, somewhere, that 
 as the record of human transactions accumulate, 
 the memory of man will have room only for those 
 of supreme cosmopolitical importance. Can we 
 claim for the birthday we are keeping a signifi- 
 cance of so wide a bearing, and so long a reach .-' 
 If we may not do that, we may at least affirm, con- 
 fidently, that the event it records and emphasizes 
 is second in real import to none that has happened 
 in this western hemisphere. The material growth 
 of the colonies would have brought about their 
 political separation from the mother country in 
 the fullness of time, without that stain of blood 
 which unhappily keeps its own memory green so 
 long. But the founding of the first English col- 
 lege here was what saved New England from be- 
 coming a mere geographical expression. It did 
 more, for it insured, and I believe was meant to 
 
262 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 
 
 insure, our intellectual independence of the Old 
 World. That independence has been long in com- 
 ing, but it will come at last ; and are not the 
 names of the chiefest of those who have hastened 
 its coming written on the roll of Harvard College ? 
 
 " I think this foundation of ours a quite unex- 
 ampled thing. Surely never were the bases of 
 such a structure as this has become and was meant 
 to be laid by a community of men so poor, in cir- 
 cumstances so unprecedented, and under what 
 seemed such sullen and averted stars. The colony 
 was in danger of an Indian war, was in the throes 
 of that Antinomian controversy which threatened 
 its very existence, yet the leaders of opinion on 
 both sides were united in the resolve that sound 
 learning and an educated clergy should never 
 cease from among them or their descendants in 
 the Commonwealth they were building up. In 
 the midst of such fears and such tumults, Har- 
 vard College was born ; and not Marina herself 
 had a more blusterous birth or a more chiding 
 nativity. The prevision of those men must have 
 been as clear as their faith was steadfast. Well 
 they knew and had laid to heart the wise man's 
 precept, ' Take fast hold of instruction ; let her 
 not go, for she is thy life.' 
 
 " There can be little question that the action of 
 
ANECDOTES AXD HARVARD ADDRESS. 263 
 
 the General Court received its impulse and direc- 
 tion from the clergy, men of eminent qualities and 
 of well-deserved authority. Among the Massachu- 
 setts Bay colonists the proportion of ministers 
 trained at Oxford and Cambridge was surprisingly 
 large, and if we may trust the evidence of contem- 
 porary secular literature, such men as Higginson, 
 Cotton, Wilson, Norton, Shepard, Bulkley, Dav- 
 enport, to mention no more, were, in learning, 
 intelligence and general accomplishment, far above 
 the average parson of the country and the Church 
 from which their consciences had driven them out. 
 The presence and influence of, such men were of 
 inestimable consequence to the fortunes of the 
 colony. If they were narrow, it was as the sword 
 of righteousness was narrow. If they had but one 
 idea, it was as the leader of a forlorn hope bad 
 but one and can have no other — ■ namely, to do 
 the duty that is laid on him and ask no questions. 
 Our Puritan ancestors have been misrepresented 
 and maligned by persons without imagination 
 enough to make themselves contemporary with, 
 and therefore able to understand, the men whose 
 memories they strive to blacken. That happy 
 breed of men who, both in Church and State, led 
 our first emigration, were children of the most 
 splendid intellectual epoch that England has ever 
 
264 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 
 
 known. They were the coevals of a generation 
 which passed on, in scarcely a diminished radiance, 
 the torch of life kindled in great Eliza's golden 
 days. Out of the new learning, the new ferment, 
 alike religious and national, and the new discov- 
 eries, with their suggestion of boundless possibil- 
 ity, the alembic of that age had distilled a potent 
 elixir either inspiring or intoxicating, as the mind 
 that imbibed it was strong or weak. Are we to 
 suppose that the lips of the founders of New Eng- 
 land alone were unwetted by a drop of that stim- 
 ulating draught 1 That Milton was the only Puri- 
 tan that had read Shakespeare and Ben Johnson 
 and Beaumont and Fletcher .' I do not believe it, 
 whoever may. Communities as well as men have 
 a right to be judged by their best. We are justi- 
 fied in taking the elder Winthrop as a type of the 
 leading emigrants, and the more we know him, the 
 more we learn to reverence his great qualities, 
 whether of mind or character. The posterity of 
 those earnest and single-minded men may have 
 thrown the creed of their fathers into the waste 
 basket, but their fidelity to it, and to the duties 
 they believed it to involve, is the most precious 
 and potent drop in their transmitted blood. It is 
 especially noteworthy that they did not make a 
 strait-waistcoat of this creed for their new college. 
 
ANECDOTES AND HARVARD ADDRESS. 
 
 26s 
 
 The more I meditate upon them, the more I am 
 inclined to pardon the enthusiasm of our old his- 
 torian when he said that God had sifted three 
 kingdoms to plant New England. 
 
 "The Massachusetts Bay colony itself also was 
 then and since without a parallel. It was estab- 
 lished by a commercial company whose members 
 combined in themselves the two by no means in- 
 congruous elements, enthusiasm and business sa- 
 gacity, the earthy ingredient, as in dynamite, hold- 
 ing in check its explosive partner, which yet could 
 and did explode on sufficient concussion. They 
 meant that their venture should be gainful, but at 
 the same time believed that nothing could be long 
 profitable for the body wherein the soul found not 
 also her advantage. They feared God, and kept 
 their powder dry because they feared him, and 
 meant that others should. I think their most re- 
 markable characteristic was their public spirit, and 
 in nothing did they show both that and the wise 
 forecast that gives it its best value more clearly 
 than when they resolved to keep the higher educa- 
 tion of youth in their own hands, and under their 
 own eye. This they provided for in the college. 
 Eleven years later they established their system 
 of public schools, where reading and writing 
 should be taught. This they did partly, no doubt, 
 
266 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 
 
 to provide feeders for the more advanced schools, 
 and so for the college, but even more, it may 
 safely be inferred, because they had found that 
 the policy to which their ends, rough-hew them as 
 they might, must be shaped by the conditions 
 under which they were forced to act, could be safe 
 only in the hands of intelligent men, or, at worst, 
 of men to whom they had given a chance to be- 
 come such. 
 
 "One is sometimes tempted to think that all learn- 
 ing is as repulsive to ingenuous youth as the mul- 
 tiplication table to Scott's little friend, Marjorie 
 Fleming, though this is due in great part to me- 
 chanical methods of teaching. ' I am now going 
 to tell you,' she writes, ' the horrible and wretched 
 plague that my multiplication table gives me ; you 
 can't conceive it ; the most devilish thing is eight 
 times eight and seven times seven ; it is what 
 Nature itself can't endure.' I know that I am ap- 
 proaching treacherous ashes which cover burning 
 coals, but I must on. Is not Greek, nay, even 
 Latin, yet more unendurable than poor Marjorie's 
 task 1 How many boys have not sympathized with 
 Heine in hating the Romans because they in- 
 vented Latin grammar } And they were quite 
 right, for we begin the study of languages at the 
 wrong end, at the end which Nature does not offer 
 
ANECDOTES AND HARVARD ADDRESS. 
 
 267 
 
 US, and are thoroughly tired of them before we 
 arrive at them, if you will pardon the bull. But is 
 that any reason for not studying them in the right 
 way ? I am familiar with the arguments for mak- 
 ing the study of Greek especially a matter of 
 choice or chance. I admit their plausibility and 
 the honesty of those who urge them. I should be 
 willing, also, to admit that the study of the an- 
 cient languages without the hope or the prospect 
 of going on to what they contain would be useful 
 only as a form of intellectual gymnastics. Even 
 so, they would be as serviceable as the higher 
 mathematics to most of us. But I think that a 
 wise teacher should adapt his tasks to the highest, 
 and not the lowest, capacities of the taught. 
 
 " For those lower, also, they would not be wholly 
 without profit. When there is a tedious sermon, 
 says George Herbert, 
 
 " ' God takes a text, and teacheth patience,' 
 
 not the least pregnant of lessons. One of the 
 arguments against the compulsory study of Greek, 
 namely, that it is wiser to give our time to modern 
 languages and modern history than to dead lan- 
 guages and ancient history, involves, I think, a 
 verbal fallacy. Only those languages can properly 
 be called dead in which nothing living has been 
 
268 JAMES RUSSELL LOIVELL. 
 
 written. If the classic languages are dead, they 
 yet speak to us, and .with a clearer voice than that 
 of any living tongue. 
 
 " ' Graus ingenium, Graus dedit ore rotundo 
 Musa loqui praeter laudera nuUius avaris.' 
 
 " If their language is dead, yet the literature it 
 enshrines is rammed with life as, perhaps, no other 
 writing, except Shakespeare's, ever was or will be. 
 It is as contemporary with to-day as with the ears 
 it first enraptured, for it appeals, not to the man 
 of then or now, but to the entire round of human 
 nature itself. Men are ephemeral or evanescent, 
 but whatever badge the authentic soul of man has 
 touched with her immortalizing finger, no matter 
 how long ago, is still young and fair as it was to 
 the world's gray father's. Oblivion looks in the 
 face of the Grecian muse only to forget her pur- 
 pose. Even for the mastering of our own tongue 
 there is no expedient so fruitful as translation out 
 of another ; how much more when that other is a 
 language at once so precise and so flexible as the 
 Greek ! Greek literature is also the most fruitful 
 comment on our own. Coleridge has told us with 
 what profit he was made to study Shakespeare and 
 Milton in conjunction with the Greek dramatists. 
 It is no sentimental argument for this study that 
 
ANECDOTES AND HARVARD ADDRESS. 269 
 
 the most justly balanced, the most serene and the 
 most fecundating minds since the revival of le'arn- 
 ing have been saturated with Greek literature. 
 We know not whither other studies will lead us, 
 especially if dissociated from this ; we do not 
 know to what summits, far above our lower region 
 of turmoil, this has led, and what the many-sided 
 outlook thence. Will such studies make anachro- 
 nisms of us 1 Unfit us for the duties and the busi- 
 ness of to-day .-' I can recall no writer more truly 
 modern than Montaigne, who was almost more at 
 home in Athens and Rome than in Paris. Yet he 
 was a thrifty manager of his estate, and a most 
 competent mayor of Bordeaux. I remember pass- 
 ing once in London where demolition for a new 
 thoroughfare was going on. Many houses left 
 standing in the rear of those cleared away bor-e 
 signs with the inscription "Ancient Lights." 
 This was the protest of their owners against being 
 built out by the new improvements from such 
 glimpse of heaven as their fathers had, without 
 adequate equivalent. I laid the moral to heart. 
 
 " I am speaking of the college as it has always 
 existed and still exists. In so far as it may be 
 driven to put on the forms of the university — I 
 do not mean the four faculties merely, but in the 
 modern sense — we shall naturally find ourselves 
 
270 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 
 
 compelled to assume the method with the function. 
 Some day we shall offer here a chance, at least, to 
 acquire the omne scibile. I shall be glad, as shall 
 we a]], when the young American need no longer 
 go abroad for any part of his training, though that 
 may not be always a disadvantage, if Shakespeare 
 was right in thinking that — 
 
 " ' Home-keeping youths have ever homely wits.' 
 
 I should be still gladder if Harvard should be the 
 place that offered the alternative. It seems more 
 than ever probable that this will happen, and hap- 
 pen in our day. And whenever this consumma- 
 tion is accomplished, it will be due, more than to 
 any and all others, to the able, energetic and simple- 
 minded man who has presided over the college 
 during the trying period of transition, and who, by 
 a rare combination of eminent qualities, will carry 
 that transition to its fulfilment without haste and 
 without jar. Oline Hast, ohne Rast. He, more 
 than any of his distinguished predecessors, has 
 brought the university into closer and more telling 
 relations with the national life in whatever that 
 life has which is most distinctive, most excellent 
 and most hopeful. But we still mainly occupy the 
 position of a German gymnasium. Under exist- 
 ing circumstances, therefore, and with the methods 
 
ANECDOTES AND HARVARD ADDRESS. 
 
 271 
 
 of teaching they enforce, I think that special and 
 advanced courses should be pushed on, as the other 
 professional courses are, into the post-graduate pe- 
 riod. The opportunity would be greater because 
 the number would be less, and the teaching not 
 only more thorough, but more vivifying through 
 the more intimate relation of teacher and pupil. 
 Under those conditions the voluntary system will 
 not only be possible, but will come of itself ; for 
 every student will know what he wants and where 
 he may get it, and learning will be loved, as it 
 should be, for its own sake as well as for what it 
 gives. The friends of university training can do 
 nothing that would forward it more than the found- 
 ing of post-graduate fellowships and the building 
 and endowing of a hall where the holders of them 
 might be commensals, remembering that when 
 Cardinal Wolsey built Christ Church at Oxford 
 his first care was the kitchen. Nothing is so great 
 a quickener of the faculties or so likely to prevent 
 their being narrowed to a single groove as the 
 frequent social commingling of .men who are aim- 
 ing at one goal by different paths. If you would 
 have really great scholars, and our life offers no 
 prize for such, it would be well if the university 
 could offer them. I have often been struck with 
 the many-sided versatility of the fellows of the 
 
272 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 
 
 English colleges, who have kept their wits in train- 
 ing by continual fencing with another. 
 
 " During the first two centuries of her existence 
 it may be affirmed that Harvard did sufficiently 
 well the only work she was called on to do, per- 
 haps the only work it was possible for her to do. 
 She gave to Boston her scholarly impress ; to 
 the Commonwealth her scholastic impulse. To the 
 clergy of her training was mainly intrusted the 
 oversight of the public schools ; these were, as I 
 have said, though indirectly, feeders of the col- 
 lege, for their teaching was the plainest. But if 
 a boy in any country village showed uncommon 
 parts, the clergyman was sure to hear of it. He 
 and the squire and the doctor, if there was one, 
 talked it over, and the boy was sure to be helped 
 onward to college, for, next to the five points of 
 Calvinism, our ancestors believed in a college edu- 
 cation ; that is, in the best education that was to 
 be had. The system, if system it should be called, 
 was a good one, a practical application of the doc- 
 trine of natural selection. Ah ! how the parents, 
 nay, the whole family, toiled and pinched that this 
 boy might have the chance denied to them. Mr. 
 Matthew Arnold has told us that in contemporary 
 France, which seems doomed to try every theory 
 of enlightenment by which the fingers may be 
 
ANECDOTES AND HARVARD ADDRESS. 
 
 273 
 
 burned or the house set on fire, the children of 
 the public schools are taught in answer to the 
 question, ' Who gives you all these fine things ? ' 
 to say, ' The State.' Ill fares the State in which 
 the parental image is replaced by an abstraction. 
 The answer of the boy of whom I have been speak- 
 ing would have been in a spirit better for the State 
 and for the hope of his own future life : ' I owe 
 them under God to my own industry, to the sacri- 
 fices of my father and mother, and to the sympa- 
 thy of good men.' Nor was the boy's self-respect 
 lessened, for the aid was given by loans, to be re- 
 paid when possible. The times have changed, and 
 it is no longer the ambition of a promising boy to 
 go to college. They are taught to think that a 
 common-school education is good enough for all 
 practical purposes ; and so perhaps it is, but not 
 for all ideal purposes. Our public schools teach 
 too little or too much ; too little, if education is 
 to go no further ; too many things, if what is 
 taught is to be taught thoroughly. And the more 
 they seem to teach, the less likely is education to 
 go further; for it is one of the prime weaknesses 
 of a democracy to be satisfied with the second-best 
 if it appear to answer the purpose tolerably well, 
 and to be cheaper — as it never is in the long run. 
 Harvard has done much, by raising its standard, 
 
274 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 
 
 to force upward that also of the preparatory- 
 schools. The leaven thus infused will, let us hope, 
 filter gradually downward, till it raise a ferment in 
 the lower grades as well. What we need more 
 than anything else is to increase the number of 
 our highly cultivated men and thoroughly trained 
 minds, for these, wherever they go, are sure to 
 carry with them, consciously or not, the seeds of 
 sounder thinking and of higher ideals. The only 
 way in which our civilization can be maintained, 
 even at the level it has reached ; the only way in 
 which that level can be made more general and be 
 raised higher, is by bringing the influence of the 
 more cultivated to bear with more energy and 
 directness on the less cultivated, and by opening 
 more inlets to those indirect influences which 
 make for refinement of mind and body. 
 
 " Democracy must show its capacity for produ- 
 cing, not a higher average man, but -the highest 
 possible types of manhood in all its manifold vari- 
 eties, or it is a failure. No matter what it does 
 for the body, if it do not in some sort satisfy that 
 inextinguishable passion of the soul for something 
 that lifts life away from prose, from the common 
 and the vulgar, it is a failure. Unless it know 
 how to make itself gracious and winning, it is a 
 failure. Has it done this } Is it doing this 1 Or 
 
ANECDOTES AND HARVARD ADDRESS. 
 
 27s 
 
 trying to do it ? Not yet, I think, if one may 
 judge by that commonplace of our newspapers, 
 that an American who stays long enough in Eu- 
 rope is sure to find his own country unendurable 
 when he comes back. This is not true, if I may 
 judge from some little experience, but it is inter- 
 esting as implying a certain consciousness, which 
 is of the most hopeful augury. But we must not 
 be impatient ; it is a far cry from the dwellers in 
 caves to even such civilization as we have achieved. 
 I am conscious that life has been trying to civilize 
 me for now nearly seventy years with what seem 
 to me very inadequate results. We cannot afford 
 to wait, but the race can. And when I speak of 
 civilization I mean those things that rend to de- 
 velop the moral forces of man, and not merely to 
 quicken his aesthetic sensibility, though there is 
 often a nearer relation between the two than is 
 popularly believed. 
 
 "The tendency of a prosperous democracy — 
 and hitherto we have had little to do but prosper 
 — is toward an overweening confidence in itself 
 and its home-made methods, an over-estimate of 
 material success, and a corresponding indifference 
 to the things of the mind. The popular ideal of 
 success seems to be more than ever before the ac- 
 cumulation of riches. I say " seems," for it may 
 
276 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 
 
 be only because the opportunities are greater. I 
 am not ignorant that wealth is the great fertilizer 
 of civilization, and of the arts that beautify it. 
 The very names of civilization and politeness show 
 that the refinement of manners which made the 
 arts possible is the birth of cities where wealth 
 earliest accumulated because it found itself secure. 
 Wealth may be an excellent thing, for it means 
 power, it means leisure, it means liberty. 
 
 " But these, divorced from culture, that is, from 
 intelligent purpose, become the very mockery of 
 their own essence, not goods, but evils fatal to 
 their possessor, and bring with them, like the 
 Nibelung hoard, a doom instead of a blessing. I 
 am saddened when I see our success as a nation 
 measured by the number of acres under tillage, or 
 of bushels of wheat exported, for the real value of 
 a country must be weighed in scales more delicate 
 than the balance of trade. The 'gardens of Sicily 
 are empty now, but the bees from all climes still 
 fetch honey from the tiny garden plot of Theocri- 
 tus. On a map of the world you may cover Judea 
 with your thumb, Athens with a finger tip, and 
 neither of them figures in the prices current, but 
 they still lord it in the thought and action of every 
 civilized man. Did not Dante cover with his hood 
 all that was Italy six hundred years ago .' And if 
 
ANECDOTES. AND HARVARD ADDRESS. 
 
 277 
 
 we go back a century, where was Germany unless in 
 Weimar ? Material success is good, but only as 
 the necessary preliminary of better things. The 
 measure of a nation's true success is the amount 
 it has contributed to the thought, the moral en- 
 ergy, the intellectual happiness, the spiritual hope 
 and consolation of mankind. There is no other, 
 let our candidates flatter us as they may. We still 
 make a confusion between huge and great. I 
 know that I am repeating truisms, but they are 
 truisms that need to be repeated in season and out 
 of season. 
 
 " The most precious property of culture and of a 
 college as its trustee is to maintain high ideals of 
 life and its purpose, to keep trimmed and burning 
 the lamps of that Pharos, built by wiser than we, 
 which warps from the reefs and shallows of popu- 
 lar doctrine. In proportion/ as there are more 
 thoroughly cultivated persons in a community will 
 the finer uses of prosperity be taught and the 
 vulgar uses of it become disreputable. And it is 
 such persons that we are commissioned to send 
 out with such consciousness of their fortunate vo- 
 cation and such devotion to it as we may. We 
 are confronted with unexpected problems. First of 
 all is democracy, and that under conditions in 
 great part novel, with its hitherto imperfectly tab- 
 
278 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 
 
 ulated results, whether we consider its effects 
 upon national character, on popular thought, or on 
 the functions of law and government. We have 
 to deal with a time when the belief seems to be 
 spreading that truth not only can, but should be, 
 settled by a show of hands rather than by a count 
 of heads, and that one man is as good as another 
 for all purposes — as indeed he is till a real man 
 is needed ; with a time when the press is more po- 
 tent for good or for evil than ever any human 
 agency was before, and yet is controlled more than 
 ever before by its interests as a business than by 
 its sense of duty as a teacher, giving news instead 
 of intelligence ; with a time when divers and 
 strange doctrines touching the greatest human 
 interests are allowed to run about unmuzzled 
 in greater number and variety than ever before 
 since the Reformation passed into its stage of pu- 
 trefactive fermentation ; with a time when the 
 idols of the market-place are more devoutly wor- 
 shipped than ever Diana of the Ephesians was ; 
 when the electric telegraph, by making public 
 opinion simultaneous, is also making it liable to 
 those delusions, panics and gregarious impulses 
 which transform otherwise reasonable men into a 
 mob, and when, above all, the better mind of the 
 country is said to be growing more and more 
 
ANECDOTES AND HARVARD ADDRESS. 279 
 
 alienated from the highest of all sciences and ser- 
 vices, the government of it. I have drawn up a 
 dreary catalogue, and the moral it points is this — 
 that the college, in so far as it continues to be 
 still a college, as in great part it does and must, is, 
 and should be, limited by pre-existing conditions, 
 and must consider first what the more general 
 objects of education are, without neglecting spe- 
 cial aptitudes more than cannot be helped. That 
 more general purpose is, I take it, to set free, to 
 supple and train the faculties in such wise as 
 shall make them most effective for whatever task 
 life may afterwards set them, for the duties of life 
 rather than for its business, and to open windows 
 on every side of the mind where thickness of wall 
 does not prevent it. Let our aim be, as hitherto, 
 to give a good all-round education, fitted to cope 
 with as many exigencies of the day as possible. I 
 had rather the college should turn out one of 
 Aristotle's four-square men, capable of holding his 
 own in whatever field he may be cast, than a score 
 of lop-sided ones developed abnormally in one 
 direction. Our scheme should be adapted to 
 the wants of the majority of undergraduates, to the 
 objects that drew them hither, and to such train- 
 ing as will make the most of them after they come. 
 Special aptitudes are sure to take care of them- 
 
28o JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 
 
 selves, but the latent possibilities of the average 
 mind can only be discovered by experiment in 
 many directions. When I speak of the average 
 mind, I do not mean that the courses of study 
 should be adapted to the average level of intelli- 
 gence, but to the highest, for in these matters it 
 is wiser to grade upward than downward, since 
 the best is the only thing that is good enough. 
 To keep the wing-footed down to the pace of the 
 leaden-soled disheartens the one without in the 
 least encouraging the other. ' Brains of three 
 generations,' says Machiavelli, 'are those that 
 understand of themselves, those that understand 
 when another shows them, and those that under- 
 stand neither of themselves nor by the showing of 
 others.' It is the first class that should set the 
 stint ; the second will get on better than if they 
 had set it themselves, and the third will at least 
 have the pleasure of seeing the others show their 
 paces. 
 
 " In the college proper, I repeat, for it is the 
 birthday of the college that we are celebrating, it 
 is the college that we love and of which we are 
 proud — let it continue to give such a training as 
 will fit the rich to be trusted with riches, and the 
 poor to withstand the temptations of poverty. 
 Give to history, give to political economy, the 
 
ANECDOTES AND HARVARD ADDRESS. 281 
 
 ample verge the times demand, but with no detri- 
 ment to those liberal arts which have formed 
 open-minded men and good citizens in the past, 
 nor have lost the skill to form them. Let it be 
 our hope to make a gentleman of every youth who 
 is put under our charge ; not a conventional gen- 
 tleman, but a man of culture, a man of intellectual 
 resource, a man of public spirit, a man of refine- 
 ment, with that good taste which is the conscience 
 of the mind, and that conscience which is the good 
 taste of the soul. This we have tried to do in the 
 past ; this let us try to do in the future. We can- 
 not do this for all at best ; perhaps only for the 
 few ; but the influence for good of a highly trained 
 intelligence and a harmoniously developed char- 
 acter is incalculable, for, though it be subtle and 
 gradual in its operation, it is as pervasive as it is 
 subtle. There may be few of these, there must 
 be few, but — 
 
 " That few is all the world which with a few 
 Doth ever live and move and work and stirre." 
 
 " They who, on a tiny clearing pared from the 
 edge of the woods built here, most probably from 
 the timber hewed from the trees they felled, our 
 earliest hall, with the solitude of ocean behind 
 them, the mystery of forest before them, and all 
 
282 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 
 
 about them a desolation, must surely {si guts 
 ' animis celestibis locus) share our gladness and our 
 gratitude at the splendid fulfilment of their vision. 
 If we could have but preserved the humble roof 
 which housed so great a future, Mr. Ruskin him- 
 self would almost have admitted that no castle or 
 cathedral was ever richer in sacred associations, 
 in pathos of the past and in moral significance. 
 They who reared it had the sublime presence of 
 that courage which fears only God, and could say 
 confidently, in the face of all discouragement and 
 doubt, ' He hath led us forth into a large place ; 
 because He delighted in me He hath delivered 
 me.' We cannot honor them too much ; we can 
 repay them only by showing, as occasions rise, 
 that we do not undervalue the worth of their 
 example. 
 
 "Brethren of the alumni, it now becomes my 
 duty to welcome in your name the guests who 
 have come, some of them so far, to share our con- 
 gratulations and hopes to-day. I cannot name 
 them all and give to each his fitting phrase. 
 Thrice welcome to them all, and as is fitting, first 
 to those from abroad, representatives of illustri- 
 ous universities that were old in usefulness and 
 fame when ours was in its cradle, and next, to 
 those of our own land from colleges and universi- 
 
ANECDOTES AND HARVARD ADDRESS. 283 
 
 ties which, if not daughters of Harvard are young' 
 enough to be so, and are one with her in heart 
 and hope. I said that I should single out none 
 by name, but I should not represent you fitly if I 
 gave no special greeting to the gentleman who 
 brings the message of John Harvard's College 
 Emmanuel. The welcome we give him could not 
 be warmer than that which we offer to his col- 
 leagues, but we cannot help feeling that in press- 
 ing his hand our own instinctively closes a little 
 more tightly as with a sense of nearer kindred. 
 There is also one other name of which it would be 
 indecorous not to make an exception. You all 
 know that I can mean only the President of our 
 country. His presence is a signal honor to us all, 
 and to us all I may say a personal gratification. 
 We have no politics here, but the sons of Harvard 
 all belong to the party which admires courage, 
 strength of purpose and fidelity to duty, and 
 which respects, wherever he may be found, the — 
 
 Justura et tenacem propositi virum, 
 
 who knows how to withstand the 
 
 Civium ardor prava jubentium. 
 
 He has left the helm of State to be with us 
 here, and so long as it is intrusted to his hands 
 
284 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 
 
 we are sure that, should the storm come, he will 
 say with Seneca's pilot, ' O Neptune, you may 
 save me if you will ; you may sink me if you will ; 
 but whatever happens, I shall keep my rudder 
 true.' " 
 
CHAPTER XXIII. 
 
 INTERNATIONAL COPYRIGHT LOWELL AT CHICAGO 
 
 RICHARD III. 
 
 THE scene in the room of the Senate Com- 
 mittee on Patents on the morning of Jan- 
 uary 29, 1886, was one of most interesting and 
 significant importance. James Russell Lowell, 
 president of the American Copyright League, 
 then and there presented in person his arguments 
 in favor of International Copyright. Says, one 
 who was present at the debate : 
 
 " The journals of the country have already 
 printed Lowell's words, but no report, verbatim or 
 otherwise, could re-create the atmosphere of this 
 remarkable scene. The legislative power, that very 
 power hitherto appealed to in vain through gener- 
 ations of authors and congressmen, was here con- 
 fronted in behalf of the intellectual world, in behalf 
 of public morality, and in the name of common 
 honesty and common sense, by one of the chief 
 living exponents of literature, — who is also one 
 of the chief citizens of the republic. Nothing 
 
 285 
 
286 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 
 
 could exceed the tact, good nature, ready wit, and 
 hurtling sarcasm with which Lowell took the 
 field. A gentleman well known in the Washington 
 lobby, and opposed to the measure, had been per- 
 mitted to precede Mr. Lowell. This, as it were, 
 gave for his lance, at the most fortunate moment, 
 an embodied foe ; though we doubt whether the 
 subject of his genial and exquisite scorn will ever 
 realize that, like one of the heroes of Dante's ' In- 
 ferno,' he was then and there transfixed for all 
 time. The keenest thrusts were accompanied by 
 a twinkle of the eye, a pleasant falling inflection 
 of the voice, or a smile that was like the glistening 
 of a Damascus blade, with an edge as sharp as its 
 glitter. It was not only in direct assault that 
 Lowell proved his ability, but throughout the long 
 session by answering quickly and ably the ques- 
 tions coming to him from every side, by turning 
 off queries too vague for answer with, for instance, 
 some quotation from Charles Lamb, and himself 
 asking questions that went to the marrow of the 
 subject. When, in answer to a question, the presi- 
 dent of the league answered, ' I do not know of 
 any way in which nations distinguish themselves 
 except by their brains, that is, permanently to 
 make an impression upon all mankind,' those pres- 
 ent could not help thinking how the truth of this 
 
INTERNA TIONAL COPYRIGHT. 
 
 287 
 
 statement was illustrated by the author of the 
 ' Biglow Papers ' and the ' Commemoration Ode,' 
 whose name to-day is known among the cultured 
 throughout the world quite as familiarly as that of 
 any battle ever fought under the American flag. 
 
 " But the great value and force of Lowell's ar- 
 gument lay in the fact that he had lifted up the 
 whole discussion from the level of interests and 
 expediences into the clear air of duties and moral- 
 ities. While he said with all distinctness and with 
 iteration that, so far as human foresight could 
 determine, the granting of foreign copyright would 
 benefit American literature, would not make 
 books dear and would be for the good of the whole 
 country, with still greater emphasis he upheld the 
 leading issue. Said Lowell, ' I myself take the 
 moral view of the question. I believe that this is 
 a simple question of morality and justice ; that 
 
 many of the arguments which Mr. used are 
 
 arguments which might be used for picking a 
 man's pocket. One could live a great deal cheaper, 
 undoubtedly, if he could supply himself from other 
 people without any labor or cost. But at the same 
 time — well, it was not called honest when I was 
 young, and that is all I can say. I cannot help 
 thinking that a book which was, I believe, more 
 read when I was young than it is now, is quite 
 
288 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 
 
 right when it says that " Righteousness exalteth 
 a nation." I believe this is a question of righteous- 
 ness. I do not wish to urge that too far, because 
 that is considered too ideal, I believe. But that is 
 my view of it, and if I were asked what book is 
 better than a cheap book, I should answer that 
 there is one book better than a cheap book, and 
 that is a book honestly come by.' 
 
 " I am in favor of cheap books. I am not in 
 favor of books poorly printed in order to make 
 them cheap, because I think we should soon be 
 suffering as much through our eyes as the German 
 nation is suffering from their bad paper and print, 
 and their obstinacy in still using the German type, 
 which is bad for the eyes. From the little experi- 
 ence I have had of some of the cheaper literature 
 that is printed in this country, I think one could 
 not read half an hour without danger to one's eyes. 
 That is really an almost national consideration. 
 But I should be very glad to have some conversa- 
 tion with the committee on this subject, some sug- 
 gestion from them rather than to talk somewhat 
 at random. I should like to ask in answer to one 
 of the points which Mr. Hubbard made — the no- 
 tion, namely, that there was no common-law prop- 
 erty in books — what is the origin of property "i 
 I am not sure that that has ever been quite set- 
 
INTERNA TIONAL COPYRIGHT. 
 
 289 
 
 tied. I think the general theory is that it was 
 force ; that the stronger man got possession of 
 what he could, and held it ; that force takes the 
 precedence of right, as Bismarck says. Advanc- 
 ing civilization is supposed to have found a better 
 system. 
 
 "But there are many pieces of property for 
 which we cannot show any common-law right. We 
 can show custom ' whereof the memory of man run- 
 neth not to the contrary.' And Mr. Hubbard's 
 notion that there is any meaning in the fact that 
 copyright was issued first to publishers springs 
 simply from the fact that as the publisher had to 
 buy the right of publication, the copyright was in 
 him as the lawyers would say ; it was not in the 
 author any longer. That follows as a matter of 
 course. As for copyright being a modern species 
 of property, that is very natural, if you remember 
 that it could not possibly have arisen before the 
 invention of the art of printing. To a certain ex- 
 tent, even while books were in manuscript, the 
 author held property in them as his own. Of 
 course he could not altogether prevent piracy. 
 But if you consider any important books before 
 the introduction of printing — take the most pop- 
 ular book, for example, of the Middle Ages (ex- 
 cept certain partial versions of the Scriptures), 
 
290 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 
 
 the Divina Commedia of Dante ; it is so long that 
 really the trouble of copying would almost have 
 given the copyist a right to the possession of 
 the book. The trouble and cost operated as a 
 safeguard to the author. The reason that copy- 
 right is modern is because the art of printing is 
 modern, and because the rapid multiplication of 
 books is even more modern than the invention of 
 printing." 
 
 We cannot give the whole debate, but a well- 
 known writer has summed it up as follows : — 
 
 "The moral question is, and always has been, 
 the leading issue in this controversy, so long left 
 unsettled through the clamoring of narrow and 
 selfish interests — interests too often able to com- 
 mand the degrading subserviency of brains fitted 
 to nobler uses. It is the moral question that has 
 most interested the thoughtful and honorable por- 
 tion of the community — which, let us not doubt, 
 is, in fact, the great body of the reading public of 
 these United States." 
 
 On the twenty-second of February, 1887, Lowell 
 was greeted at the Central Music Hall, Chicago, 
 by a brilliant audience assembled to hear him 
 deliver an address on American Politics. 
 
 " On the platform was a distinguished array of 
 gentlemen, including ex-cabinet members. Federal 
 
INTERNATIONAL COPYRIGHT. 291 
 
 and State judges, generals, ecclesiastical dignita- 
 ries, and many leading representatives of the com- 
 mercial interests of Chicago and the Northwest. 
 On behalf of the Union League Club, General 
 George W. Smith, introducing Mr. Lowell, ex- 
 plained that the address was the first of an annual 
 series under the auspices of the club, the idea be- 
 ing to inaugurate if possible a revival of the gen- 
 eral recognition of the birthday of Washington 
 and create among the people a higher political 
 culture. 
 
 Mr. Lowell on coming forward was greeted with 
 prolonged applause. He said : — 
 
 "When I received the invitation to speak here 
 to-night, and, indeed, until a short time ago, I had 
 an impression that I was to speak as one of a 
 course. It was an erroneous impression, I know, 
 but it was a sincere one. I was offered my 
 choice of two topics, politics or literature, and 
 at first I chose politics ; but I now appear in a 
 new capacity to announce a change of programme. 
 After having written an address on politics, when 
 I came to read it over, I felt I stood in a very 
 dehcate position. I was to address a mixed au- 
 dience — an audience composed of both parties. 
 I was not speaking in my own person, but as 
 the representative of a club composed of both 
 
292 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 
 
 parties. Now, I believe, I have been in the habit 
 at times of speaking my mind pretty strongly, 
 perhaps sometimes too strongly, but I found 
 this was an occasion on which I was placed in a 
 delicate position, where I could not express myself 
 with entire frankness, as one speaking in my own 
 person. You all know, of course, quite as well as 
 I do that a text is a mere bruUitn fulmen, without 
 direct and immediate illustration, and I have ob- 
 served, as I dare say you have, that direct and im- 
 mediate illustrations seem to have some personal 
 applications in them. Direct applications and illus- 
 trations seem to have gone to the school of the 
 prophet Nathan, and if they do not say in so m?.ny 
 words 'Thou art the man,' they always seem to 
 imply it. It seemed to me I had better throw up 
 my political discourse, though with great reluc- 
 tance, because I could not make it to my mind, 
 and shall fall back on the other limb of the choice 
 offered me — that is, some literary topics. I am 
 the more convinced of the wisdom of the choice 
 since my arrival in Chicago, for it would cause mc 
 the greatest possible regret if any word of mine 
 should mar the cordiality of a welcome which will 
 be one of the pleasantest recollections of my life. 
 I shall therefore ask you to listen to a few words 
 on criticism, and then apply them to the play of 
 
INTERNATIONAL COPYRIGHT. 293 
 
 ' Richard III.' and to the absence of certain things 
 in that play which seem to indicate to my mind it 
 is not Shakespeare's work." 
 
 The speaker then proceeded with the disserta- 
 tion on " Richard III.," showing how the very 
 opening of the play was clumsy, and that there 
 was little in it, save the soliloquy of Clarence, 
 and some part of the speech of Richard to his 
 army, that was in keeping with the master mind. 
 Shakespeare might have edited or retouched the 
 play, but it was impossible to conceive that he 
 originated it. " It may be safely said," contin- 
 ued Lowell, "that since the publication of Words- 
 worth's 'Peter Bell' no quotation has done such 
 effective service as — 
 
 " A primrose by the river's brim, 
 A yellow primrose was to him, 
 And it was nothirg more.'' 
 
 " It has been assumed as Wordsworth assumed, 
 that by this very sincerity and simplicity of vision, 
 and by his honesty in letting it be known, Peter 
 was somehow guilty of a blacker treason than that 
 of his great namesake in the servants' hall in the 
 palace of the High Priest. Nobody seems, how- 
 ever, to have thought of asking under what theory 
 of duty poor Peter was bound to have those nice 
 optics see what was not to be seen. And it is as 
 
294 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 
 
 useless to ask for a new trial in the case of Peter 
 Bell as in that of Socrates. He had been guilty 
 of a misprision of high aesthetics, that most un- 
 pardonable of all crimes — for does it not involve 
 almost a blindness of your view of a primrose, and, 
 what is still worse, of my view of a primrose ? He 
 must be content to sit pilloried forever as the 
 typical Philistine. Were it only for the allitera- 
 tion one is almost inclined to pity poor Peter. 
 No doubt but under a practical and strictly busi- 
 ness view of the question the culprit could find a 
 great deal to say for himself had he owed Words- 
 worth a shilling, for example, and offered a six- 
 pence in full payment on the ground that the 
 smaller coin was a great deal more to him than to 
 his creditor. It may be suspected that the defec- 
 tive vision would have shifted to the side of the 
 late poet laureate. The French juries, when a 
 highly atrocious crime has been tried before them, 
 have an old fashion of agreeing upon a verdict of 
 guilty with extenuating circumstances. And I 
 myself, in the case of Peter Bell, am sometimes in- 
 clined to think that there may be grounds on 
 which even he might be recommended to mercy. 
 
 " Is it not, I ask, a relief to meet new and then 
 with a person who sees things precisely as they 
 are ? And especially is it not a relief sometimes 
 
INTERNATIONAL COPYRIGHT. 
 
 29s 
 
 to meet such people in criticism ? Is not even 
 Dr. Johnson's want of subtlety sometimes almost 
 refreshing in an age when criticism is peculiarly 
 what is called creative, when each critic is bound 
 to dive deeper and to come up — I won't venture 
 to say with our legendary — higher than his pre- 
 decessors, and professing to have seen something 
 in the depths of the primrose that nobody ever saw 
 there before ? He must either be original or be 
 paradoxical, as the cheapest counterfeit of original- 
 ity, or there seems to be no good reason for his 
 being at all. I have in the course of my life met 
 with critics who have gone about to persuade me 
 that I ought not to like Gray, or Cooper, or Scott, 
 or Byron, and I know not whom else, simply be- 
 cause they were not as Wordsworth or Shelley was. 
 Nay, it has been hinted sometimes that even 
 Shakespeare himself was no better than he should 
 be. Whatever feast of wit has been spread for us 
 by the choicest spirits of all times, we really seem 
 to be in danger of finding ourselves, like Sancho 
 in his Governorship of Barataria — scarcely is 
 there a dish set before us but the steward touches 
 it with his staff and orders it away as of a nature 
 to disagree with us. 
 
 " No doubt it is perfectly true that the very high- 
 est forms of poetical imagination are of a supreme 
 
296 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 
 
 rarity, and that their culmination, impassionate in- 
 tensity of utterance, is even rarer. The flash is 
 gone ere one can say 'Hghtning.' There is cer- 
 tainly no such pang of intellectual pleasure as 
 when our own imaginations, drawn forth and kin- 
 dled by that of the poet in such a supreme mo- 
 ment, are mingled with it in an embrace of fire.4 
 but there is a region of milder and more equable 
 delights, less feverish and perhaps more whole- 
 some for 'human nature's daily food.' If 'man 
 cannot live by bread alone,' so neither can he live 
 by stimulants and spices alone. It is one of the 
 highest offices of criticism to teach us how to find 
 a field of not only what is best, but also what is 
 good of its kind in all the arts. Mr. Ruskin holds 
 a divining rod of exquisite sensitiveness as well 
 for the more recondite sources of purified enjoy- 
 ment as for those more obvious and nearer to the 
 surface ; and the breadth of the great Goethe's 
 mind, the catholicity of his culture, and therefore 
 of his apprehension, is nowhere more to be noted 
 than in his hospitality to every variety of merit, 
 be it high or low. We are reminded by his char- 
 acter of the Arab legend in which the hero is said 
 to have had three hundred and sixty-five gates to his 
 palace to admit guests, one for every day in the 
 year. We turned around on the majority of the 
 
INTERNATIONAL COPYRIGHT. 297 
 
 poets of the last century, as the teacher of rhetoric 
 did on M. Jourdain, and astonished them very much 
 by telling them that they had been talking prose all 
 their lives without knowing it. It cannot be denied 
 that there were just causes of complaint, for most 
 people like to take their poetry neat, and the mix- 
 tures these gentlemen supplied in perfect good 
 faith contained as large a proportion of water as 
 the proverbial milk of commerce. The reaction 
 was justifiable ; but it went, I think, too far, as is 
 generally the case with such oscillations of senti- 
 ment. Nothing short of imagination in its highest 
 and deepest manifestations would satisfy us ; noth- 
 ing short of expression distilled to the very quint- 
 essence of poignant praise. A definition of poetry 
 came into vogue which would exclude Horace and 
 the other delightful workers in fancy, which would 
 exclude Crabbe and others. But there is surely a 
 great deal of literature of which one is inclined to 
 say, with Mercutio : ' It is not so deep as a well, 
 nor so wide as a church-door, but it is enough. It 
 will serve.' 
 
 " It was precisely this kind of literature on which 
 the new tests told with most destructive force. 
 But I find myself insensibly diverging from what 
 I meant to say, which is that however excellent 
 the style of criticism may be which finds infinite 
 
298 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 
 
 deeps and marvellous revelations in a primrose, it 
 may yet be very grievously misapplied. I think 
 it has been notoriously so misapplied of late years 
 in the case of Shakespeare, and especially by 
 some of the later German critics. There has 
 been a competition among them in seeing more 
 and deeper than any one has ever seen before. 
 Shakespeare is supposed to have written with so 
 many conflicting rules of man's relation to the 
 universe as would have prevented his writing at 
 all. A simpler view of the case would seem to be 
 that he was a playwright who, because he hap- 
 pened also to be a great poet and a profound 
 observer, gradually developed into the most mar- 
 vellous dramatist that ever lived. I propose to 
 say a few words on one of the plays usually at- 
 tributed to him — a play in respect of which I 
 find myself in the position of poor Peter Bell, 
 seeing a little more than an ordinary primrose 
 where I perhaps hoped to see a plant, a flower of 
 light. I mean the play ' Richard III.' Horace 
 Walpole, you remember, wrote his 'Historic 
 Doubts ' about the character of Richard IH., and 
 I shall venture my critical doubts as to the author- 
 ship of the play which bears his name. I have no 
 intention of applying to it the system of criticism 
 which I consider as untrustworthy as it is fasci- 
 
INTERNATIONAL COPYRIGHT. 299 
 
 nating, and which I think has already been carried 
 beyond its legitimate limits. All that I should 
 believe it absolutely safe to say of Shakespeare is 
 that he never wrote deliberate nonsense, nor was 
 knowingly guilty of defective metre ; and even 
 tests like this I would apply with commendable 
 modesty and hesitating reserve, conscious that 
 the meaning of words, and, still more, the associa- 
 tions which they call up — and an important fact 
 always to remember in reading literature as old as 
 Shakespeare — has changed since his day, that 
 the accentuation of many words was variable, and 
 that Shakespeare's ear might very likely have 
 been as delicate as his other senses. On the 
 point of Shakespeare's verse, I may say in pass- 
 ing that his verse is often used as a test for the 
 period of which his plays were written. Cole- 
 ridge, whose sense of harmony and melody was 
 perhaps finer than that of any modern poet, did 
 not allow his own dramatic verse the same license, 
 or I might almost say the same mystifications 
 which he esteems so valuable in interpreting that 
 of Shakespeare. This is certainly remarkable. 
 For my own part I am convinced that if we had 
 Shakespeare's plays as he wrote them and not as 
 they have come down to us, deformed by the care- 
 less hurry of the copyists, who copied the parts at 
 
300 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 
 
 the emendation of incompetent actors, the mis- 
 hearing of shorthand writers, I am convinced that 
 we should not find a demonstrably faulty verse 
 or a passage obscured for any other reason than 
 because of its depth of thought or its highest 
 subtlety of phrase. I know that in saying this I 
 am laying myself open to the reproach of apply- 
 ing common sense to a subject which of all others 
 demands uncommon sense for its adequate treat- 
 ment ; demands a perception and divination almost 
 as infallible as the operations of that creative 
 mind the attempts to measure which are illusive 
 and seemingly abnormal. 
 
 "But in attempting to answer a question like 
 that I have suggested I should be guided by con- 
 siderations far less narrow. We cannot identify 
 printed thoughts by the same minute comparisons 
 that would serve to establish the handwriting of 
 them. To smell a rose is surely quite otherwise 
 convincing than to count its petals. In guessing 
 at the authorship of an anonymous book like the 
 ' Doctor,' or Bulwer's ' Timon,' for example, while 
 one should lay some stress upon tricks of man- 
 ner, I should be far less influg.nced by the fact 
 that many passages were above or '^below the ordi- 
 nary level of any author whom I suspected of 
 writing it, than by the fact that there was a sin- 
 
INTERXATIONAL COPYRIGHT. 301 
 
 gle passage, however short, absolutely different in 
 kind from his habitual tone. A man may surpass 
 himself or he may fall below himself, but he never 
 escapes from his own nature. I would not be un- 
 derstood to mean that common sense is always or 
 universally applicable in criticism. Certainly com- 
 mon sense will never suffice for the understanding 
 or enjoyment of those fine translunary things that 
 our first poets did, as one of our first poets him- 
 self, Drayton, said of them, but it is at least a 
 remarkably good precaution against mistaking a 
 hand-saw for a hawk. 
 
 "What, then, is the nature of the general consid- 
 erations which I think we ought to bear in mind 
 in debating a question like this — the authenticity 
 of one of Shakespeare's plays .-' First of all and 
 last of all I should put style ; not style in its nar- 
 row sense of mere verbal expression, for that may 
 change and does change with the growth and 
 training of a man, but in the sense of that some- 
 thing, more or less clearly definable, which is 
 always and everywhere peculiar to the man, and 
 either in kind or degree distinguishes him from 
 all other men — the kind of evidence which, for 
 example, makes us sure that Swift wrote 'The 
 Tale of a Tub' or Scott 'The Antiquary,' be- 
 cause nobody else could do it. There is a gait 
 
302 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 
 
 which marks the mind as well as the body. But 
 even if we took the word style in that narrower 
 sense which would define it as the diction or form 
 of phrase, Shakespeare is equally incomparable. 
 Coleridge, evidently using the word in this- nar- 
 rower sense, tells us that ' Such divinity doth 
 hedge our Shakespeare round that we cannot even 
 imitate his style. I have tried to imitate his man- 
 ner in the " Remorse," and when I had done I 
 found I had been tracking Beaumont and Fletcher 
 and Massinger instead.' It is really very curious. 
 Greene, a contemporary of Shakespeare, in a well- 
 known passage seems to have accused him of 
 plagiarism, and there are verses, and sometimes a 
 succession of verses, by Green himself, by Peale, 
 and especially by Marlowe, which are comparable 
 so far as externals go with Shakespeare himself. 
 Nor is this at all wondered at in men so nearly 
 contemporary with Shakespeare. No one comes 
 so near to the versification of Shakespeare as 
 Spenser and Marlowe. Some of the verses of 
 Marlowe have the same trick of ringing in the 
 ear as Shakespeare's. There is, for instance, the 
 famous description of Helen, or rather exclama- 
 tion of Faust when he first sees Helen : 
 
 " Was this the face that launch'd a thousand ships 
 And burnt the topless towers of Ilium .' " 
 
INTERNATIONAL COPYRIGHT. 
 
 303 
 
 " A phrase which, if I am not mistaken, lingered 
 even in the ear of Shakespeare. But the most 
 characteristic verses of Shakespeare himself do 
 not so much linger in the ear as to embed them- 
 selves in the very substance of the mind and 
 quiver years after in the memory like arrows that 
 have just struck and still feel the potent impulse 
 of the bow. No whole scene of Shakespeare, even 
 in his 'prentice days, could be mistaken for the 
 work of any other man ; for, give him room 
 enough, and he is sure to betray himself by some 
 quality which is either his alone or his in such 
 measure as none ever shared but he. I am 
 reminded of a remark of Prof. Masson which 
 struck me, that one day, when tired with over- 
 work, he took up a copy of Dante, and after read- 
 ing in it for half an hour he shut the book and 
 found himself saying to himself : ' Well, this is 
 literature.' And I think that this may be applied 
 to the mature work of Shakespeare, and in a great 
 measure even to the work of the young Shake- 
 speare. Take the whole scene together, and there 
 are sure to be passages in it of which we cannot 
 say that they are really literature in that high 
 meaning of the word. 
 
 " It is usual to divide the works of Shakespeare 
 by periods, but it is not easy to do this with even 
 
304 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 
 
 an approach to precision unless we take the higher 
 quaUties of structure as a guide. As he matured, 
 his plays became more and more organisms and 
 less and less suppositions of juxtapositions of 
 scenes strung together on the thread of the plot. 
 In assigning periods too positively, I fancy we 
 are apt to be misled a little by the imperfect 
 analogy of the sister art of painting and by those 
 who are called the great masters. But manual 
 dexterity is a thing of far harder and slower ac- 
 quisition than the art of melodious versification. 
 The fancy of young poets is only too apt to be 
 superabundant. It is the imagination which ripens 
 with the judgment, and asserts itself as the shap- 
 ing faculty in a deeper sense than belongs to it as 
 a mere maker of pictures when the eyes are shut. 
 Young poets, especially if they are great poets, 
 learn the art of versification early, and their poeti- 
 cal vocabulary increases by exercise, and they can 
 pick out and assimilate what is to their purpose 
 with astonishing rapidity. The lyrical poetry of 
 Dante was at least in part written before he was 
 twenty-five, and in some respects it is as perfect 
 as anything in his maturer works. Keats died 
 even younger than that and left behind him poems 
 that astonish us as much by their purity of style 
 and their Attic grace of form as they take us cap- 
 
INTERNATIONAL COPYRIGHT. 305 
 
 tive by their music. I think it is very interesting 
 to find Shakespeare improving on a phrase of his 
 own. It is something that no one else could do. 
 This he does in some of his sonnets. The thing 
 in which we should naturally expect Shakespeare 
 to grow more perfect by practice and observation 
 would be in a knowledge of stage effect and skill 
 in presenting his subject in the most telling way. 
 It would be on the side of the dramatist or the 
 playwright rather than on the side of the poet 
 that we should look for development. To him, as 
 to Moli^re, his perfect knowledge of stage busi- 
 ness gives an enormous advantage. If he took a 
 play in hand to remodel it for his company, it 
 would be the experience of the actor more than 
 the genius of the poet that would be called into 
 play. His work would lie in the direction proba- 
 bly of curtailment oftener than of enlargement ; 
 and, though it is probable that in the immature 
 plays attributed to him in the edition of 1623, yet 
 it is hard to believe that he can be called their 
 author in anything like the same sense as we are 
 sure he is the author of those works in which no 
 other hand has ever been capable of the same 
 mastery. It must be remembered that we come 
 to the reading of all the plays attributed to Shake- 
 speare with the preconception that they are his, 
 
3o6 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 
 
 If we come to a play thinking it is his, it is aston- 
 ishing how many things we excuse, how many 
 things we slur over, and so on for various reasons 
 not entirely satisfactory, I think, if strictly cross- 
 examined. The German poet and critic Goethe 
 believed in the Shakespearean authorship of all 
 the supposititious plays, and in regard to one of 
 them, at least, ' The Yorkshire Tragedy,' drew his 
 arguments from the diction. Now, so far as mere 
 words go, the dramatists of Shakespeare's time all 
 drew from the same common fount of vocabularies. 
 The movement of their verse so far as it was me- 
 chanical would naturally have many points of re- 
 semblance. One of the tests is that of the double 
 ending — that is, where there is a superfluous 
 syllable at the end of the verse. Shakespeare 
 tried it now and then in the choruses of ' Henry 
 V.', and it was used in ' Henry VHI.', and used 
 there with considerable success. The finest ex- 
 amples almost of the picturesque verse of Shake- 
 speare are to be found in the choruses of ' Henry 
 V.', and in one of those, the chorus of the third 
 act, you will find that the double ending occurs 
 very frequently and is used most adroitly both for 
 the purpose of the melody of the verse and to 
 give a certain undulating motion to it, as Shake- 
 speare described the fleet : 
 
INTERNATIONAL COPYRIGHT. 307 
 
 " ' A city on th' inconstant billows dancing ; 
 For so appears this fleet majestical, 
 Holding due course to Harfleur. Follow, follow.' 
 
 "Mr. Lowell then read various passages from 
 Beaumont and Fletcher, Chapman and other poets, 
 comparing them with Shakespeare and character- 
 izing them as almost artificial in the comparison. 
 He also quoted copiously from ' Cymbeline ' and 
 others of Shakespeare's plays, and said : 
 
 '"I do not think it would be easy to find a whole 
 scene in one of Shakespeare's acknowledged plays 
 where his mind seems at dead low tide through- 
 out, and lays bare all its shallows and its ooze. I 
 think it is sometimes even a defect that he is apt 
 to be turned out of his direct course by the first 
 metaphysical quibble, if I may venture to call it 
 so, that pops up in his path.' 
 
 "The lecturer read Arcite's 'Invocation to 
 Mars,' and called attention to the beautiful pict- 
 ures it presented. The second character of Shakes 
 peare was as a humorist, but the lecturer dwelt 
 only slightly upon this point. The third charac- 
 ter of Shakespeare was his eloquence, which was 
 well illustrated by Antony's oration over the body 
 of Caesar and the dialogue between Ulysses and 
 Achilles in 'Troilus and Cressida.' The three 
 greatest qualities of Shakespeare were subtlety of 
 
3o8 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 
 
 poetic inspiration, humor and eloquence. Shakes- 
 peare's patriotism was also commented upon, and 
 the lecturer called attention to the fact of his 
 ardent patriotism as shown in his plays, with 
 possibly the exception of 'Richard III.' Shake- 
 speare's treatment of the element of the super- 
 natural was well worthy of attention, because it 
 showed the singularly philosophical turn of his 
 mind. In ' Hamlet ' the* Prince does not believe 
 in the existence of the ghost for a long time. In 
 ' Macbeth,' in the scene where Banquo's ghost 
 takes the Thane's seat, Macbeth sees the appari- 
 tion, while to the rest of the company it is in- 
 visible. The procession of ghosts in ' Richard 
 III.' always struck Mr. Lowell as rather ludicrous 
 and odd, rather than impressive. The speech of 
 Henry V. before the walls of Harfleur was spe- 
 cially commended as a specimen of eloquence. 
 The cause of various peculiarities in some of the 
 plays ascribed to Shakespeare was accounted for 
 on the supposition that Shakespeare had simply 
 remodelled old plays instead of producing them 
 from the raw material himself. In this connec- 
 tion he said : 
 
 "'It appears to me that an examination of 
 "Richard III." plainly indicates that it is a play 
 which Shakespeare adapted to the stage, making ad- 
 
INTERNATIONAL COPYRIGHT. 309 
 
 ditions, sometimes longer and sometimes shorter ; 
 and toward the end he either grew weary of his 
 work or was pressed for time, and left the older 
 author, whoever he was, pretty much to himself. 
 . . . While I firmly believe in the maintenance 
 of classical learning in our universities, I never 
 open my Shakespeare that I do not find myself 
 wishing that there might be professorships estab- 
 lished for the expounding of his works, as there 
 used to be for those of Dante in Italy. There is 
 nothing in our literature so stimulating and so 
 suggestive as the thoughts which he seems to drop 
 by chance as if his hands were too full of them. 
 Nothing so cheery as his humor, nothing that laps 
 us in elysium so quickly as the lovely images 
 which he marries to the music of his verse. He 
 is also the great master of rhetoric in teaching us 
 what to follow, and also perhaps quite as often in 
 teaching us what to avoid. I value him above all 
 for this, that for those who know no language but 
 their own, there is as much intellectual training to 
 be got from the study of Shakespeare's works as 
 from those of any — I had almost said from any 
 of the ancients — I had almost said of all the an- 
 cients put together.' " 
 
 "An elaborate banquet was tendered to Mr. 
 Lowell in the evening by the Union League Club. 
 
310 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 
 
 Covers were laid for three hundred and twenty-five 
 guests. The principal speakers were Congress- 
 man Jehu Baker, General Lucius Fairchild and Mr. 
 Lowell. The remarks of Mr. Lowell were of an 
 informal character, but were wholly devoted to a 
 discussion of various phases of politics in this 
 country. The burden of the speech was that the 
 so-called ' practical politician ' and the corner-groc- 
 ery politician must go. He did not give any fur- 
 ther explanation for changing the subject of his 
 afternoon address, although the matter has caused 
 much comment." 
 
CHAPTER XXIV. 
 
 LECTURES AT THE LOWELL INSTITUTE. 
 
 DURING the winter of 1887 Lowell delivered 
 an interesting series of lectures before the 
 Lowell Institute upon the " Early English Dram- 
 atists." From these lectures we make the follow- 
 ing extracts : 
 
 " The names of Beaumont and Fletcher are as 
 inseparably linked together. as those of Castor and 
 Pollux. They are the double star of our poetical 
 firmament, and their names are so closely min- 
 gled that it is vain to attempt any division of them 
 that shall assign to each his rightful share. The 
 general tradition seems to have been that Beau- 
 mont contributed artistic judgment, and Fletcher 
 fine frenzy. There is probably a grain of truth in 
 traditions of this kind. In the plays written by 
 the two poets jointly, we may find an intellectual 
 entertainment in assigning this passage to one 
 and that to the other ; but we can seldom say de- 
 cisively, ' This is Beaumont's and that is Fletch- 
 er's,' though we may find tolerably convincing ar- 
 3" 
 
312 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 
 
 guments for doing so. Fletcher, I should say, 
 probably added very much to the subtleness of 
 conversational phrases in the drama. In short, 
 what I have been hesitating to hint is that I am 
 glad to think Fletcher more the poet of the two. 
 Both had the art of being pathetic, and of conceiv- 
 ing pathetic situations, but neither of them had 
 depth enough of character for that tragic pathos 
 which is too terrible for tears. Beaumont and 
 Fletcher's comedies are certainly amusing, and 
 one of them, ' Wit Without Money,' is excellent, 
 with some scenes of a joyous vein in it that are 
 very cheerful. The fourth scene of the third act 
 is a masterpiece of fanciful extravagance. This is 
 probably Fletcher's. 
 
 "The conversations in Fletcher's comedies are 
 often laughable, but what is called the wit of them 
 is generally a gentlemanlike banter — that is, what 
 was gentlemanly in that day. Nothing grows 
 mouldy so soon as mere fun, the product of ani- 
 mal spirits. Fletcher had far more of this than of 
 true humor ; and yet both he and Beaumont were 
 skilled in that pleasantry which is a skillful sub- 
 stitute for that trenchant article in good society. 
 Nearly all of their comedies have the merit of be- 
 ing laughable, which, to one who has read many 
 comedies, is saying a great deal. I do not mean 
 
LECTURES AT THE LOWELL INSTITUTE. 313 
 
 to say that Fletcher does not sometimes show an 
 almost tragic power, as he constantly shows tragic 
 sensibility. Beaumont and Fletcher have drawn 
 upright women. We must never forget that the 
 coarseness of phrase is not always coarseness of 
 thought. Women were allowed to talk then and 
 to use words now forbidden outside of the slums. 
 Decency changes its terms, though not its nature, 
 from one age to another. This is a partial excuse 
 for Beaumont and Fletcher, but they sinned against 
 that intellect of the conscience which is the same 
 in all ages. The comparison sometimes instituted 
 between Shakespeare and Beaumont and Fletcher 
 suggests one remark of some interest, namely, 
 that not only are his works by far more cleanly in 
 thought and phrase than those of any other of his 
 important contemporaries ; not only are his men 
 more manly and his women more womanly than 
 others, but his types of gentlemen and ladies are 
 altogether beyond any they seem to have been 
 capable of conceiving. I think Beaumont and 
 Fletcher rank next to Shakespeare in their import- 
 ance and in the amount of pleasure they give, 
 though not in the quality of it, in the fanciful 
 charm of expression. In spite of all their coarse- 
 ness there is delicacy and sensibility, an airy ro- 
 mance, and, above all, a grace, in their best work. 
 
314 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 
 
 that make them forever attractive to the young 
 and to all those who have learned to grow old ami- 
 ably. Their poetry is genuine, spontaneous and at 
 first hand. The delight they give, the gayety 
 they inspire, are all their own. Perhaps one main 
 cause of this is their lavishness, their happy con- 
 fidence in resources that never failed them. Their 
 minds worked without that unwilling creak which 
 pains us in most of the later dramatists. They 
 had that pleasure in writing, evidently, which gives 
 pleasure in reading ; and they deserve our grati- 
 tude because they promote cheerfulness, or a pen- 
 sive kind of melancholy that is very far from sad- 
 ness." 
 
 The third lecture in the course was given to an 
 audience limited in numbers, as at all the other 
 lectures, only by the size of the room. The spe- 
 cial subject was "John Webster." 
 
 " Lowell spoke of his reference in his opening 
 lecture to the deficiency in respect to form which 
 is to be observed in nearly all the dramatic literature 
 of the time under consideration. In a play, said 
 the lecturer, we not only expect a succession of 
 scenes, but that each scene shall lead to some- 
 thing that follows. That is to say, the structure 
 should be organic, with a necessary relation of the 
 parts, and not merely with a mechanical and hap- 
 
LECTURES AT THE LOWELL INSTITUTE. 315 
 
 hazard joining of one part to another. In the 
 arrangement of a play the majority of the elder 
 playwrights were so unskilled, or so negligent, 
 that they seemed perfectly content if a story got 
 divided into the proper intervals of acts or scenes, 
 and arrived at last to a satisfactory end in mar- 
 riage or murder, as the case might require. The 
 motives which impel and control the movement 
 are seldom sufhciently apparent. There seems to 
 be no reason why any one of the characters should 
 do this or that more than another. They are serv- 
 ants of all work, ready to be villain or fool at a 
 moment's notice. The weakness of the earlier 
 playwrights was that they esteemed those bounds 
 best that were largest, and let their action grow 
 till they were obliged to stop it. Many of Shakes- 
 peare's contemporary poets must have had every 
 advantage he had in practical experience, and all 
 of them probably had as familiar an intercourse 
 with the theatre as he ; but what a difference be- 
 tween their manner of constructing a plot and 
 his ! In all his dramatic works his skill in this is 
 more or less apparent ; in his mature days, un- 
 rivalled. From the very first scene he seems to 
 have beheld, as from a tower, the end of all. In 
 Romeo and Juliet, for example ■ — and I turn to 
 that as being a comparatively early play — he has 
 
3i6 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 
 
 a Story before him and follows it closely enough, 
 but how naturally one scene is linked to another. 
 How directly each scene leads to the next. If 
 this play illustrates anything, it would seem to be 
 that our lives are ruled by chance ; but nothing 
 is left to chance in the action. The play advances 
 with the exactness of destiny. The characters are 
 made subordinate to the interests of the play, as if 
 it were something in which they had a concern. 
 
 '"These thoughts,' said Mr. Lowell, 'have 
 brought forcibly to my mind the miscellaneous 
 crudities of plot in the plays of John Webster. 
 All we know of Webster may be very shortly 
 summed up. We do not know when he was born. 
 We do not know when he died. All that we really 
 know about him is that he first appears in 1601 
 as having assisted in a certain play, and that he 
 disappears in 1624. In his plays the plqts are very 
 complicated, and they are made still more puzzling 
 by the somewhat motiveless conduct of many of 
 his characters. When Webster invented a plot 
 of his own, he filled it with scenes and incidents 
 such as not merely to baffle the understanding, but 
 such as the imagination cannot get over. There 
 is something in Webster that reminds me of Victor 
 Hugo. There is at times the same confusion of 
 what is big with what is great ; the same fondness 
 
LECTURES AT THE LOWELL INSTITUTE. 
 
 317 
 
 for moral speculation, the same insufferably repul- 
 sive details, the same indifference to probability, 
 the same leaning toward the grotesque, the same 
 love for effect at whatever cost. Whatever other 
 effect Webster may produce upon us, he never 
 leaves us indifferent. We may criticise as we will, 
 but we shudder and admire, nevertheless.' " 
 
 The special topic for the- evening of the closing 
 lecture was " Massinger and Ford." 
 
 " Lowell said that Philip Massinger was born in 
 1584 and died in 1639. His father was Arthur 
 Massinger. Very little is known of the early life 
 of Philip Massinger. It is certain, however, that 
 he spent four years at Oxford University, though 
 without taking a degree. Massinger wrote thirty- 
 seven plays, of which only eighteen have come 
 down to us. To me, said Mr. Lowell, Massinger 
 is one of the most interesting, indeed, one of the 
 most delightful, of the old dramatists ; not so much 
 for any passion or power in him, though at times 
 he does rise to both of them, but for the love he 
 manifests toward those things which are lovely and 
 of good report in human nature, his sympathy for 
 what is generous, high minded and honorable, and 
 for the equable flow of good, every-day kind of 
 poetry, with a few rapids or cataracts, but singularly 
 smooth and companionable. His plays generally 
 
3i8 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 
 
 show excellent versification, with skillful breaks 
 and pauses, and admitting great variety of emotion. 
 Massinger never rants and is never bombastic. In 
 him nothing seems written merely to fill up empty 
 space. His plays are interesting for the story and 
 the way it is told. I doubt if there are as many 
 short passages of sparkling wit to be found in his 
 works as in those of inferior men. But in reading 
 him one feels that he is in the company of a serious 
 and thoughtful person, if not a great thinker. In- 
 deed, few great thinkers are so interesting as he. 
 If he never calls out all the forces of his readers 
 to attempt to solve the profound problems of 
 psychology, he is infinitely suggestive of not un- 
 profitable reflection. His is a world whose course 
 is equable and where calm pleasures abide. 
 
 " I read through ' The Arabian Nights ' a few 
 years ago with as much pleasure as I did when I 
 was a boy. It appears to me to be the business 
 of an imaginative writer to offer us a sanctuary 
 from the world of the newspaper, in which we live 
 and have to live, whether we will or no. Unskillful 
 story tellers always raise our suspicions by putting 
 a foot note to every improbable occurrence, which 
 says ' This is a fact.' So, when the realist says 
 ' These are the facts of life,' all I can say is, that 
 if these are facts, I do not want them. The police 
 
LECTURES AT THE LOWELL INSTITUTE. 319 
 
 reports give me more than enough every day. But 
 the real facts are such as are recognized in the 
 deep chambers of the soul. The old poets had a 
 very lordly contempt for probability, when im- 
 probabilities would serve the purpose better. But 
 Massinger taxes our credulity less than most of 
 them. I do not remember any of those sudden 
 conversions in his works, from baseness to loftiness 
 and from vice to virtue, which trip up all our ex- 
 pectations so startlingly in many an old play. And 
 as to material improbabilities, let us remember 
 that two hundred and fifty years ago many things 
 were possible that are not possible now. Then 
 men might be taken captive by the Corsairs or the 
 turbaned Turk, as occasion might require, and sold 
 into slavery. The boundaries of the probable, if 
 not the possible, were far wider then than now. 
 Massinger was discreet in the use of these privi- 
 leges. His conception of character was ideal. He 
 impresses one as a manly kind of person, and to 
 that we owe no small share of our pleasure in 
 reading his works. 
 
 " Referring to the poet Ford, who formed a part 
 of his subject for the evening, the lecturer said 
 that the association of him with Massinger was 
 altogether an arbitrary one, as there was nothing 
 in common between them. Ford was a poet who 
 
320 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 
 
 was a master of the artificial appeals to emotion 
 which may be styled sentimentality. He has always 
 an air of saying something without ever saying it, 
 and is therefore disagreeable to a man who values 
 time. He lingers over his heartbreaks too much. 
 
 " In closing his course, Mr. Lowell expressed 
 his thanks to his hearers for the patient attention 
 with which they had followed him, and spoke in 
 earnest words of the value of the poetical studies 
 as tending to develop the spiritual side of our 
 natures, and to ransom us out of the hard and 
 prosy actuality which is growing too prevalent in 
 our age." 
 
 Summing up his wonderful powers we can well 
 join in the eulogy of one who says : — 
 
 " Lowell is now in the mellow maturity of his 
 reputation as our chief man of letters, and has the 
 added prestige of having made himself illustrious 
 as the minister of the United States at the court 
 of Saint James. He is not likely to go higher, 
 unless in his late prime he bursts upon the world 
 with a fresh outpouring of the fullness of original 
 song, in which he has given proof that the source 
 of his inspiration is not exhausted. He need not 
 go higher to hold a permanent place in letters and 
 in the history of his country. It is this feelingi 
 of his well-deserving recognition, and of his true 
 
LECTURES AT THE LOWELL INSTITUTE. 321 
 
 modesty in not seeking it, which has called forth, 
 wherever he has appeared since his return from 
 England, the voluntary plaudits of his fellow- 
 country-men." 
 
 In his recent contributions to The Atlantic 
 Monthly, we see the " Lowell fecit " upon every 
 poem, and hear the ring of the true coin. As an 
 observing writer says : — 
 
 " We have sought for some dominant charac- 
 teristic, and have found the singer resolved into 
 oracle, philosopher, statesman, preacher, wit. With 
 such protean shape we cannot grapple. Let us 
 declare him, without reservation, the foremost all- 
 round poet that America has thus far brought 
 forth. And let posterity, if it can, undo the 
 verdict," 
 
CHAPTER XXV. 
 
 LAST WRITINGS. 
 
 WHILE Lowell was Minister to the Court 
 of St. James, a friend who visited him in 
 London wrote: "His house in Lowndes Square 
 seems but a resting-place by the way. Through 
 all his wanderings in many lands, beautiful Elm- 
 wood, the home of his father, the place of his 
 birth, the grave of his children, and the spot where 
 sixty years of his life have been spent among his 
 books, seems always to claim him as its own." 
 
 And with the same feeling, all the poet's friends 
 rejoiced when after a brief stay at Southborough 
 on his return from Europe, Lowell again occupied 
 the old homestead of Elmwood with his daughter. 
 Here, in the beloved study of old, most of his later 
 poems and essays have been written. 
 
 Beaver Brook revisited, inspired his pen again 
 in the poem "My Brook " : 
 
 " It was far up the valley we first plighted troth, 
 When the hours were so many, the duties so few; 
 
 Earth's burden weighs heavily now on us both — 
 But I've not forgotten those dear days ; have you ? 
 322 
 
LAST WRITINGS. 32 
 
 Each was first-born of Eden, a morn without mate, 
 And the bees and the birds and the butterflies thought 
 
 'Twas the one perfect day ever fashioned by fate, 
 
 Nor dfeamed the sweet wonder for us two was wrought. 
 
 I loitered beside you the whole summer long, 
 I gave you a life from the waste-flow of mine ; 
 
 And whether you babbled or crooned me a song, 
 I listened and looked till my pulses ran wine. 
 
 'Twas but shutting my "eyes ; I could see, I could hear. 
 
 How you danced there, my nautch-girl, 'mid flagroot and fern 
 
 While the flashing tomauns tinkled joyous and clear, 
 On the slim wrists and ankles that flashed in their turn. 
 
 Ah, that was so long ago I Ages, it seems, 
 
 And, now I return sad with life and its lore. 
 Will they flee my gray presence, the light-footed dreams, 
 
 And Will-o'-wisp light me his lantern no more ? 
 
 The life that I dreamed of was never to be, 
 For I with my tribe into bondage was sold. 
 
 And the sungleams and moongleams, your elf-gifts to me, 
 The miller transmutes into work-a-day gold. 
 
 What you mint for the miller will soon melt away ; 
 
 It is earthy, and earthy good only it buys, 
 But the shekels you tost me are safe from decay ; 
 
 They were coined of the sun and the moment that flies. 
 
 Break loose from your thraldom 1 'Tis only a leap ; 
 
 Your eyes 'tis but shutting, just holding your breath ; 
 Escape to the old days, the days that will keep, 
 
 If there's peace in the millpond, so is there in death. 
 
324 LAST WHITINGS. 
 
 You are mine and no other's ; with life of my life 
 
 I made you a Naiad, that were but a stream ; 
 In the moon are brave dreams yet, and chances are rife 
 
 For the passion that ventures its all on a dream. 
 
 Leapt bravely I Now down through the meadows we'll go 
 To the Land of Lost Days, whither all the birds wing. 
 
 Where the dials move backward and asphodels blow ; 
 Come flash your tomauns again, dance again, sing I 
 
 Yes, flash them and clash them on ankle and wrist. 
 
 For we're pilgrims to Dreamland, O Daughter of Dream I 
 
 There we find again all that we wasted or mist. 
 
 And Fancy — poor fool ! — with her bauble's supreme. 
 
 As the Moors in their exile the keys treasured still 
 Of their castles in Spain, so have I ; and no fear 
 
 But the doors will fly open, whenever we will. 
 To the prime of the Past and the sweet of the year." 
 
 This poem was published in the Christmas issue 
 of the New York Ledger, December 13, 1890, and 
 Lowell received a thousand dollars for it. 
 
 In the Atlantic Monthly for July, 1890, a fine 
 sonnet appears from Lowell's pen, entitled, " In a 
 Volume of Sir Thomas Browne." It closes with 
 these strong lines : 
 
 All potent phantasy, the spell is thine ; 
 Thou layst thy careless finger on a word. 
 And there, forever, shall thy influence shine. 
 The witchery of thy rhythmic pulse be heard : 
 Yea, where thy foot hath left its pressure fine. 
 Though but in passing haunts the Attic bird." 
 
LAST WRITINGS. 325 
 
 The last poem of Lowell's published in the At- 
 lantic Monthly was the " Inscription for a Memorial 
 Bust of Fielding," which appeared in the Septem- 
 ber number, 1890. But in the Contributors' Club of 
 the December issue, Lowell, under the anonymous 
 " Mr. X." gives us the last chapter of his inimi- 
 table and charming prose, in the article entitled, 
 " Thou Spell, Avaunt " : 
 
 " I was once honored by the friendship of a 
 man of explosive prejudices. He was a proof- 
 reader, and worthy to be coupled with Alexander 
 the Corrector. Amenity itself in the commerce 
 of private life, in his office he was immitigable. 
 His honesty was aggressive ; his frankness had 
 the inhuman innocency of childhood. Like some 
 other zealous magistrates, he made incursions be- 
 yond the legitimate boundary of his province. No 
 misquotation but he set it in the pillory ; no mixed 
 metaphor but he pursued it through all its wind- 
 ings like a ferret. He was a killing frost to every 
 over-venturesome flower of speech ; none such 
 could take his winds of March with its beauty ; a 
 faulty construction quailed before him like a pre- 
 varicating witness before Jeffries, and every solcr 
 cism found in him a Torquemada. His were, 
 indeed, bloody assizes, and on the margin of a 
 proof-sheet his red pencil left a calamitously san- 
 
326~ LAST WRITINGS. 
 
 guine trail behind it. He would have dealt as 
 unmercifully with his own epitaph, could he have 
 had the chance, and I trust there is no misplaced 
 comma therein to disturb his well-earned rest. 
 But, above all, his bile was blackened by any 
 indecency in spelling. 
 
 " I had occasion to visit this Rhadamanthus one 
 day, where he sat in chambers at the printing 
 house. Ordinarily his good-mornings were cere- 
 monious, and one approached business by a gentle 
 slope through health and weather; but now he 
 turned upon me with a glare in his spectacles as 
 of personal wrong, and without preliminary greet- 
 ing blared forth : ' Mr. X., when I come down to 
 my office in the morning, it is my habit to begin 
 the duties of the day by reading a chapter of the 
 New Testament. But if by any chance it should 
 happen that I found the words of my Blessed 
 Redeemer printed in the Websterian cacography, 
 I'd hurl them behind the backlog!' All this in 
 a single jet, and with an absence of punctuation 
 that would never have escaped him in a proof- 
 sheet. Recovering himself with a courteous apol- 
 ogy for his abruptness, he explained that he had 
 been correcting a manuscript polluted with those 
 heresies of spelling. I confess that I share these 
 orthodox antipathies and resentments ; that I, too, 
 
LAST WRITINGS. 
 
 327 
 
 glow with these sacred heats. Are they the less 
 grateful that they are unreasonable ? They are 
 peremptory as instincts, and will not be denied. 
 
 " You will say, perhaps, that the meaning is the 
 main thing, and provided that be clear the spell- 
 ing may go hang. But stay : since we have but 
 twenty-six letters to spend upon our literature, 
 since Shakspeare had no more for his all-potent 
 incantations, should there not be method and fru- 
 gality in the administering of so small a patri- 
 mony "i Not that a seemly superfluity should not 
 be indulged on occasion. Does not 'honour' 
 lose something of its state and ' flavour ' of its 
 benevolence when the ti in each has been econo- 
 mized .' A cynic will scowl at this as a trifling 
 ceremonial, but such niceties are the thin parti- 
 tions that divide us from barbarism. Nay, the 
 mere misplacing of a letter or an accent may 
 vulgarize a fine sentiment, or make a harmlessly 
 erroneous statement offensive. If a man write 
 that he was standing in the centre of the street 
 when he means the middle, does not his crime call 
 for sterner discipline if he call his impossible 
 whereabouts the ' center ' t 
 
 " I suppose that I prefer the old-fashioned, 
 switch-tailed ■ cheque ' to the docked form my 
 countrymen have adopted. To me this has the 
 
328 LAST WRITINGS. 
 
 air of a disrespectful nickname for that species of 
 literature which has the supreme art of conveying 
 the most pleasure in the least space. Not that I 
 am fanatical, for the editor would not find me im- 
 placable who should write to me that he ' enclosed 
 his check ' for double the amount expected. Yet 
 there are outrages in the like kind which it would 
 be pusillanimous to endure meekly. Such is the 
 Revised Version of the Scriptures, for example. 
 It may be more true to the letter that killeth, but 
 does it not prosaically evaporate that aroma of 
 association at once the subtlest and the most 
 potent gramarye of Imagination t Does it not 
 make the Almighty speak like a spruce writer of 
 leaders .■' To drop figures of speech for those 
 of Arithmetic, I believe that the American vocab- 
 ularies contain more words than the British ; but 
 in spite of this victory of superior numbers, it is 
 becoming in us to be merciful, and to admit that 
 the English have some rights in their mother 
 tongue which an American is bound to respect. 
 When our cousins are in good humor, they talk of 
 our common language ; when they are not, they 
 tax us with an uncommon language, and spice 
 their abhorrence of it with modes of speech in 
 which I am quite willing to renounce any share 
 whatever. I was put upon these reflections by 
 
LAST WRITINGS. 329 
 
 seeing in Notes and Queries the copy of a letter 
 from Mr. W. E. Norris to the editor of the London 
 Times, protesting against any complicity in the 
 spelling used in a book of his printed in England 
 from plates made in America. 
 
 " Mr. W. E. Norris is the author of several enter- 
 taining novels, written in a very comfortable Eng- 
 lish, as times go. He tells us that he wrote his 
 letter ' with tears running-down his pen,' and it 
 would be easy to turn the tables upon him by 
 hinting that a careful analysis could detect no salt 
 in the water which he mixes with his ink. But 
 this were a cheap advantage to take, especially in 
 the case of one to whom I am a debtor for much 
 wholesome and innocent entertainment. Besides, 
 it is not with Mr. Norris that I have a crow to 
 pluck, and I have said enough to show that I 
 entirely sympathize with his feeling of the indig- 
 nity that has been put upon him. No; what I 
 protest against is that his letter should be printed 
 under the heading of 'Americanisms' — a head- 
 ing under which certain contributors to Notes and 
 Queries seem eager to show how easy it is to trip 
 over ignorance into ill manners. They write about 
 the English and American languages without 
 knowing the rudiments of either. To drop the u 
 out of ' honour ' or to write ' plow ' for ' plough ' 
 
330 LAST WRITINGS. 
 
 may be archaisms, if you will, but they are not 
 Americanisms. Formerly, all English words de- 
 rived from French originals ending in eur changed 
 it to our: and properly enough, since the accent 
 fell on the last syllable, as may be seen in Chaucer. 
 . . . Do Englishmen never read their older 
 literature in the original editions, as Charles Lamb 
 loved to do.' Such spellings are not American- 
 isms, but survivals. True Americanisms are self- 
 cocking phrases or words that are wholly of our 
 own make, and do their work shortly and sharply 
 at a pinch. Of the former we have invented many 
 so bewitching for their quaintness or brevity, their 
 humor or their fancy, that our English cousins 
 have not been squeamish in corroborating the 
 urbanely languid ranks of their diction with these 
 backwoods recruits. Of the latter we have coined 
 too many that are refused admission to the higher 
 society of the vocabulary because they are unidio- 
 matic or vulgar, or both. Of acceptable and sure- 
 to-be accepted words I cite ' shadow ' and ' stage ' 
 as active verbs, both in unassailable analogy with 
 'coach,' 'floor,' 'ship,' and so many others. 'To 
 voice,' which is laid at our door, is an inheri- 
 tance, and though I cannot now lay my hand on 
 the reference that would prove it, I feel sure that 
 'to shadow' will yet prove its Elizabethan origin. 
 
LAST WRITINGS. 331 
 
 as its features seem to warrant. These and their 
 like spare us cumbersome periphrases, and are 
 sure of adoption because they chime in with that 
 instinct for short cuts which connotes English as 
 the language that, beyond all others, means busi- 
 ness and the hurry implied in it. 
 
 " I believe that one of the spellings that were too 
 much for Mr. Norris's sensibilities was ' center.' 
 I do not wonder. But this again is no American- 
 ism. It entered the language in that shape, and 
 kept it at least so late as Defoe. . . . 
 
 " The best English commerces alike with the 
 shelf and the street. Formal logic can never be 
 applied to language, which has a logic of its own 
 of more than feminine nimbleness, and verbal 
 critics should learn their own tongue before they 
 meddle with others. As for idioms, I should 
 advise such critics to ponder deeply what the Rev. 
 E. Young in his Pre-Raffaellitism says of defini- 
 tions : ' It may be almost said of them as Con- 
 fucius said of the gods : " Respect them ; take 
 care not to offend them ; have as little to do with 
 them as possible." ^nd on our side we should 
 remember that we have every right in the lan- 
 guage we have inherited which our elders and 
 betters had, that we may enlarge, enrich and 
 modify ; but may not deface it.' " 
 
332 LAST WRITINGS. 
 
 It was during this last year of his life that 
 Lowell edited the Riverside edition of his works, 
 now complete in ten volumes — six of which are 
 prose, and four poetry. 
 
 In this revised edition he says of his earlier 
 work : 
 
 " I have refrained from modifying what was 
 written by one — I know not whether to say so 
 much older or so much younger than I — but at 
 any rate different in more important respects, and 
 this partly from deference to him, partly from 
 distrust of myself." And yet in looking through 
 this revised edition, hundreds of alterations will be 
 found ; many of them dealing with punctuation, 
 but more with a significant change of words; and 
 in some instances a number of entirely new lines 
 have been added to the original text. 
 
 When we remember that these changes were 
 made nearly half a century after the earlier poems 
 were written, it shows us the author's earnest de- 
 sire to be a candid, impartial critic of himself, and 
 to make all his written thoughts consistent with 
 the maturer judgment of his riper years. 
 
 In the prefatory note to his Harvard Lectures, 
 he expresses a certain regret for not having put 
 into form the verbal illustrations that went with 
 most of these chapters, and says that because 
 
LAST WRITINGS. 
 
 333 
 
 they were written for the ear rather than the eye, 
 they have a rhetorical tone. 
 
 The reading public had long expected from his 
 pen, and Lowell himself had fully intended to 
 write, in these later years, a biography of his be- 
 loved friend Nathaniel Hawthorne. But so many 
 days were clouded by physical suffering that this, 
 and many other writings planned, were destined 
 never to be fulfilled. " lie felt the personal losses 
 which are the severest penalty of advancing life. 
 
 "The last time I met him, says Edward Ever- 
 ett Hale, I congratulated him that he was at 
 Elmwood, and he said, with his tender smile, ' Yes, 
 it is good to be there, but the house is full of 
 ghosts.' And so indeed it was. But he could not 
 be morose ; he would not oppress his friends with 
 the story of any of his own regrets ; and the last 
 and earliest memories which we have of him are 
 of his cordiality, affection and tender sympathy." 
 
CHAPTER XXVI. 
 
 LAST DAYS. 
 
 EVER since his return from England in 1885, 
 Lowell had suffered from frequent attacks 
 of sciatica, and during the winter of 1890-91 his ill 
 health obliged him to cancel numerous lecture en- 
 gagements. But it was not until within a few 
 weeks of his death that his condition was regarded 
 as critical. 
 
 A complication of liver trouble with the sciatica 
 proved too great to be resisted by a man of 
 Lowell's age, and general debility. Early in the 
 summer of 1891, he was taken seriously ill at 
 his home in Elmwood, and as his old physician 
 and friend. Dr. Morrill Wyman, was abroad, the 
 doctor's son-in-law, Henry P. Wolcott, M. D., was 
 summoned to take charge of the case. 
 
 Two professional nurses were immediately put 
 on duty, and Mrs. Burnett, his daughter, was in 
 constant attendance ; but a letter from Dr. Wyman 
 to friends of the family, showed them how little 
 hope there was for his recovery. About two 
 334 
 
LAST DAYS. 
 
 335 
 
 weeks before his death he became delirious, and 
 thinking himself far from home, he would beg 
 piteously to be taken back to Elmwood and his 
 family. Then the illusion would change, and he 
 would fancy he was entertaining royal visitors. 
 
 On Sunday, August 9, he seemed better, and 
 the delirium left him. On Monday, he appeared 
 stronger and brighter than at any time during his 
 long illness. The intense heat of the succeeding 
 day had an unfavorable effect ; and his suffering 
 was so great upon being moved, that he exclaimed, 
 " Oh ! why don't you let me die } " These were 
 his last words. From that time he began to sink 
 rapidly, until about two o'clock on Wednesday 
 morning, August 12, he quietly passed away. 
 
 And yet — in the poet's own words, uttered 
 when Channing died — we exclaim : 
 
 " I cannot think thee wholly gone ; 
 
 The better part of thee is with us still ; 
 Thy soul its hampering clay aside hath thrown, 
 And only freer wrestles with the 111. 
 " Thou livest in the life of all good things : 
 
 What words thou spak'st for Freedom shall not die ; 
 Thou sleepest not, for now thy Love hath wings 
 To soar where hence thy Hope could hardly fly. 
 " And often from that other world, on this 
 
 Some gleams from great souls gone before may shine, 
 To shed on struggling hearts a clearer bliss, 
 And clothe the right with lustre more divine." 
 
336 LAST DA YS. 
 
 At noon on Friday, August 14, a large assembly 
 — and what a notable throng it was of men and 
 women eminent in literature, art and science! — 
 gathered in the old Appleton Chapel at Harvard 
 University, to pay their last tribute to the great 
 poet and statesman. There were no services at 
 Elmwood, and a little before twelve o'clock the 
 funeral cortege left the house. The procession en- 
 tered the chapel led by Bishop Brooks, and Dean 
 Wm. Lawrence of the Harvard Theological School, 
 who recited alternately the lines of the beautiful 
 Episcopal burial service beginning, " I am the res- 
 urrection and the life." Following Bishop Brooks 
 and Dean Lawrence, were the pall-bearers, Oliver 
 Wendell Holmes, George William Curtis, President 
 Eliot of Harvard College, William Dean Howells, 
 John Holmes (the brother of Dr. Holmes), Chris- 
 topher P. Cranch, C. F. Choate, Prof. Charles 
 Eliot Norton, Prof. Francis Child and John 
 Bartlett. 
 
 Then came the somber black casket with a 
 wreath of ivy leaves upon it, gathered from the 
 ivies at Elmwood by the poet's daughter, and 
 bearing this simple inscription upon the plate: 
 
 died august 12, 189i, 
 James Russell Lowell, 
 aged 72 years, 5 months. 
 
LAST DA YS. 
 
 337 
 
 Following the bier were the relatives of the 
 poet: Mr. and Mrs. Edward Burnett and their 
 children, Mrs. Putnam, Miss Lowell, Mr. C. 
 Lowell, Mr. and Mrs. Putnam — the latter a niece 
 of the poet — and Miss Putnam. 
 
 At the base of the pulpit rested a beautiful 
 wreath of roses, a token from the poet's sister, 
 Mrs. Putnam, and on either side hung wreaths of 
 ivy and laurel. Here the casket was placed, and 
 the service was continued with the solemn anthem, 
 " Lord, let me know mine end," rendered most 
 impressively by a male quartette. 
 
 Then followed the beautiful Scripture lesson 
 from the fifteenth chapter of First Corinthians, and 
 the chanting of Mendelssohn's " Beati Mortui," 
 by the choir. Bishop Brooks pronounced the 
 burial prayers, and after the singing of " I heard 
 a Voice from Heaven," the Lord's Prayer was 
 repeated, and the simple, solemn service was 
 ended. 
 
 As the choir intoned the " Libera me Domine," 
 the two clergymen again led the funeral cortege, 
 followed by the pall-bearers ; the bier was borne 
 out of the chapel, and the long procession of car- 
 riages wended its way to Mt. Auburn where the 
 Committal Service was read by Bishop Brooks, 
 " Dust to dust, ashes to ashes." How eloquently 
 
338 LAST DA VS. 
 
 the bowed heads and silent tears of those present 
 at these last sad rites, attested to the warm, per- 
 sonal regard felt by all his friends towards the 
 illustrious dead ! — 
 
 " The poet sleeps; no more he dreameth dreams 
 
 Beneath the glittering stars, — to wake and tell. 
 
 No more he, clarion-voiced, will sing away 
 
 Men's heavy burdens and with mighty minstrelsy 
 
 Smite, note by note, their fetters free. 
 
 Ah ! what divine and wondrous themes 
 
 Are his to choose whose feet now stray 
 
 In heavenly fields, who, living, loved so well 
 
 The flowers that hidden in the wild woods dwell. 
 
 That every tender grace they wore 
 
 He set in some sweet song to bloom forevermore ! 
 
 O silent poet ! in thy hushed heart lies 
 
 Knowledge of unencompassed mysteries, 
 
 Thou sleepest well — and yet — our eyes are wet. 
 
 If thy mute lips could breathe the world's regret. 
 
 Then fit the song. Elsewhere thy soul has found 
 
 Music ineffable, and so been crowned 
 
 With cadences celestial; thou art 
 
 Of the Eternal Symphony a part. 
 
 And 'neath thine eyes 
 
 In the white light of Heaven, eternal beauty lies." 
 
 The Lowell family lot in Mt. Auburn is on the 
 right of Fountain Avenue, near the main entrance, 
 and only a short distance from Longfellow's grave. 
 Recalling the warm friendship that ever existed 
 
LAST DAYS. 
 
 339 
 
 between the two poets, it seems mosc fitting that" 
 in their last resting place they should be so near 
 together. As the "herons of Elmwood" wing 
 their way over the marshes, will they not still 
 sing ? — 
 
 " The surest pledge. o£ a deathless name 
 Is the silent homage of thoughts unspoken I " 
 
 From Queen Victoria a message of condolence 
 and sympathy was sent to the poet's daughter, as 
 soon as the sad news reached England. On Satur- 
 day, August 15, impressive services in memory of 
 the dead poet were held in Westminster Abbey, 
 and Canon Farrar in his fine oration said, most 
 truly, that " Lowell was one of the greatest of 
 American poets of this generation. But he was 
 more than a poet. He had many claims on the 
 memory of Americans and Englishmen. He was 
 a scholar and a student of the first rank. He 
 was also a critic, but his satire was akin to charity. 
 Though his shafts struck home, they were never 
 poisoned. He was a finished orator. His rich 
 eloquence was unsurpassed in either country. He 
 had made his second home in England, where, as 
 well as in America, he was truly loved. He was 
 one of the sacred unions that bound England to 
 America more closely. The same blood ran in 
 
340 LAST DA YS. 
 
 each of our veins ; both spoke the tongue of 
 Shakespeare, and b-^th held faith in the morals of 
 Milton. Lowell was one of those true Americans 
 to whom the slaves owed their freedom, and 
 twenty million of his fellow-citizens their awakened 
 consciousness. English universities bestowed 
 upon him their proudest honors. He has now 
 passed away, loved and revered by the two mighti- 
 est nations of the world." 
 
 Sir Edwin Arnold adds this "laurel wreath" to 
 the memory of James Russell Lowell : " I knew 
 him as a man, and in knowing him lost no jot of 
 my admiration and affection for him as an author, 
 which does not often happen. . . . He was 
 even greater as a critic and supreme judge of 
 literature than as the writer of that magnificent 
 Commemoration Ode and the inimitable ' Biglow 
 Papers.' It is much when all the world must say 
 that the least of the many distinctions of this 
 sweet and subtle-natured man of letters was, that 
 he held with a noble usefulness and perfect loyalty 
 to 'both Englands,' so great a post as that of 
 Minister from the United States to Great Britain." 
 
 Bret Harte writing from England says : " To 
 my pride as an American, in the frank admiration 
 and loving appreciation shown of Lowell's intellect 
 and character personally here, I have to add my 
 
LAST DAYS. 341 
 
 own expression of sorrow at the loss of one of the 
 most fastidious and cultivated professors in my 
 calling, and one of its gentlest yet manliest 
 
 critics." 
 
 A life-long friend, T. W. Parsons, writes : 
 
 " Like as the lark that soaring higher and higher 
 
 Singeth awhile, then stops as 'twere content 
 With his last sweetness, having filled desire. 
 
 So paused our bard ; not that his force was spent. 
 Nor that a string was loosened in his lyre, 
 
 But having said his best and done his best 
 He could not better what was given before ; 
 
 And threescore years and ten demanding rest 
 Whispered, They want thee on the other shore," 
 
CHAPTER XXVII. 
 
 Lowell's will. — tributes to the poet and 
 statesman. reminiscences, etc. 
 
 IN Lowell's last will and testament, signed the 
 fifteenth day of May, 1891, the greater part of 
 his property is left to his daughter, Mabel Lowell 
 Burnett. Other bequests are as follows : 
 
 " I give to my friend Charles Eliot Norton, a 
 book from my library at his discretion. 
 
 "I give to my grandson James Burnett Lowell, 
 my seal, which formerly belonged to my father. 
 
 " I give to the corporation of Harvard College 
 — for the library thereof — my copy of ' Webster 
 in Witchcraft,' formerly belonging to Increase 
 Mather, president of the college, and also any 
 books from my library of which the college library 
 does not already possess copies, or of which the 
 copies or editions in my library are for any reason 
 whatsoever preferable to those possessed by the 
 college library. 
 
 " I give to my friend Charles Eliot Norton, all 
 my manuscripts, correspondence and papers to dis- 
 342 
 
TRIBUTES TO THE POET. 343 
 
 pose of the same at his discretion, hereby consti- 
 tuting him my literary executor." 
 
 Whatever material, therefore, Lowell had gath- 
 ered for his Life of Hawthorne, will now pass to 
 the hands of his intiniate friend. Prof. Norton, for ■ 
 completion. 
 
 Edmund Clarence Stedman, who has often ac- 
 knowledged that he owes more to Lowell's influ- 
 ence, direct and indirect, than to any other teacher, 
 declares that " Lowell was unquestionably the 
 head of the literary profession in America, and 
 when you say he was at the head in America, as 
 an all-around man-of-letters, I think you will have 
 to include Great Britain also. When he went 
 abroad as our diplomatic representative, every 
 writer and scholar felt that he was as much the 
 minister of the American literary guild as he was 
 of the Nation. Lowell's governing instinct was 
 literary. Any one who knew him in his home life 
 at Cambridge, associates him with shelves of rare 
 books, early folios and all things suggestive of 
 scholarship and literary investigation. At the 
 same time he also had the genuine New England 
 character, and nevercould be contented to figure 
 as a mere bookworm. . . . The fine thing about 
 Lowell was his plentiful and original genius. This 
 was so rich that he never was compelled, like 
 
344 
 
 TRIBUTES TO THE POET. 
 
 many writers, to hoard his thoughts, or be miserly 
 with his bright sayings. When warmed by com- 
 panionship and in talk, he gave full play to this 
 spontaneity, and said enough witty and epigram- 
 matic and poetic things to set up a dozen small 
 talkers or writers. 
 
 " Perhaps the only Englishman of modern times 
 between whom and Lowell you could draw a parallel 
 after the Plutarchian method was Matthew Arnold. 
 Each consciously or unconsciously became the 
 leader of the younger members of his craft, and 
 perhaps Arnold was regarded with more" devotion 
 by his younger associates, not to say pupils, than 
 was Lowell. But Lowell's genius was far more 
 original and at command. Arnold had wit, and so 
 had Lowell, but Lowell in addition had a never 
 failing humor. . . . Without doubt he was the 
 greatest literary critic this country has ever pro- 
 duced. He was a well-equipped scholar in the 
 branches of learning to which he was devoted ; in 
 modern languages, of course, and especially in old 
 English, early English literature, and both the 
 curious and standard literature of many tongues. 
 
 " As a poet, while very unequal, owing to the 
 constant injection of his opinions on things local 
 and temporal, as well as things eternal, into his 
 verse, it is noteworthy that he produced the best 
 
TRIBUTES TO THE POET. 
 
 345 
 
 poems of several classes we have had. His ' Big- 
 low Papers,' first and second series, placed him 
 easily at the head of all dialect poets of his and 
 younger generations. There is no such mingling 
 of pathos, humor, wit and intellectual force in any 
 modern work of their kind. Again his ' Commem- 
 oration Ode ' is, on the whole, the most noble and 
 massive of American lyrics. And in such minor 
 lyrics as ' In the Twilight,' he reaches a music of 
 dithyrambic quality almost unapproachable. I 
 should say, at the same time, no single volume of 
 his poems, as a whole, equalled the first book of 
 poems put forth by Emerson, as long ago as 1846. 
 
 " Probably as many young Americans have been 
 inspired by Lowell to devotion to letters as were 
 influenced in character and methods of thought by 
 Emerson." 
 
 Edward Everett Hale who was in the class at 
 Harvard following Lowell's, writes : " The young 
 men who were around Mr. Lowell in his college 
 days knew, fifty years ago, that he was to be one 
 of the greatest poets of the time, as well as they 
 know now that he has achieved that promise. The 
 members of his own class with perfect unanimity 
 appointed him their class poet, and this was not 
 before he had written and published poems the 
 sweetness and tenderness of which are still re- 
 
346 TRIBUTES TO THE POET. 
 
 membered. There is, indeed, a touching anecdote 
 perfectly authenticated, of the half plaintive way 
 in which dear Dr. Lowell, his revered father, said 
 to a friend that James had promised him that he 
 would give up writing poetry and would take to 
 study. There is hardly a father in the world who 
 would not feel gratified if his son at the university 
 made such a promise. But as one recalls the story 
 now, it is simply to be thankful that Dr. Lowell 
 misapprehended the precision of the promise, or 
 that the poet found it impossible for him to make 
 good his words. The instinct of the poet was in 
 him, and it was not to be trampled out by any 
 firm resolution of the student." 
 
 Dr. George B. Loring, a classmate of the poet's, 
 says : " Lowell was not only bright and keen in 
 his mental processes, but he always impressed his 
 associates and the world with his pure integrity. 
 He knew no such thing as equivocation. At times 
 he appeared a little sharp, but he was always true 
 and always encouraged exact truth in his com- 
 panions. His vitality was unbounded. He was a 
 sportsman, and I have now the fowling-piece he 
 gave me when he retired from the hunter's field. 
 He was untiring in his pursuit of letters. While 
 we were in college he spent most of his time with 
 Chaucer and the old English dramatists. As sec- 
 
TRIBUTES TO THE POET. 
 
 347 
 
 retary of the Hasty Pudding Club, his work was 
 inimitable, and the record book will be found well 
 filled with his bright and telling little poems on 
 the events and Fellows of the society." 
 
 Another intimate friend writes : " Lowell in his 
 early life was as famous for his humor, wit and 
 good-fellowship, as all his friends of fifty years' 
 standing well know, as he was in late times for 
 his literary genius and eminent ability. One little 
 incident I recollect as occurring about half a cen- 
 tury since. Some fifteen or twenty of us had col- 
 lected on Fresh Pond, skating, and playing ball. 
 The game was in full progress when there was a 
 cry for help. A little colored boy skating about 
 almost unnoticed, had fallen through an air-hole. 
 There was an immediate rush to save him, Lowell 
 among the foremost, but they came too near the 
 hole, and the ice being very thin, in they went m 
 quick succession, some four or five of them. Mat- 
 ters began to look serious. No help was at hand 
 and we had to go a long distance to the shore for 
 a sail or plank of any kind. At length after a 
 long and dangerous delay, the whole party were 
 fished out, the little blacky with chattering teeth 
 and half dead with cold included. 
 
 " As Lowell and myself walked home together, 
 he suddenly burst out into a loud and merry 
 
348 TRIBUTES TO THE POET. 
 
 laugh. I turned round and asked him what he 
 found so amusing. ' Why,' said he, ' all the time 
 we were in the water together, I kept calling out 
 to the poor little fellow, " keep cool, keep cool ; " 
 how perfectly absurd ! ' " 
 
 "The death of James Russell Lowell," says 
 George Ticknor Curtis, " awakens in me a long 
 train of recollections. I knew him when he was 
 a little boy. He was ten years old and I was six- 
 teen when, in 1827-28, we both attended as day 
 pupils the boarding-school of Mr. William Wells 
 in Cambridge, which was nearly opposite the 
 house of the Rev. Dr. Lowell, James's father. In 
 that house James was born, and he had the rare 
 good fortune to live in it all his life, except when 
 he was abroad. His first wife, Maria White, of 
 Watertown, was my second cousin. She was a 
 most intellectual person, of highly spirituelle 
 nature, and her influence in developing in him a 
 propensity to literary pursuits was very great. 
 Her constitution was extremely delicate, and she 
 died early, leaving a daughter, her only child, now 
 Mrs. Burnett. 
 
 " I remained at Mr. Wells' school only one 
 year. In August, 1828, I entered Harvard Col- 
 lege, leaving 'Jimmy Lowell,' as we called him, 
 still at the school. Mr. Wells was an Englishman. 
 
TRIBUTES TO THE POET. 345 
 
 married to a lady who was a member of the Bost 
 family in Boston, and they had three grown-up 
 daughters and two younger sons. Mr. Wells was 
 a fine classical scholar, and a stern schoolmaster 
 of the old-fashioned English type. He always 
 heard a recitation with the book in his left hand 
 and a rattan in his right, and if the boy made a 
 false quantity or did not know the meaning of a 
 word down came the rattan on his head. But this 
 chastisement was never administered to me or 
 to ' Jimmy Lowell.' Not to me because I was too 
 old for it, and not to him because he was too 
 young. 
 
 " I graduated from Harvard in 1832, six years 
 before Lowell. I did not know much about him 
 until after he became engaged to my cousin. Miss 
 White. It was a long engagement, for James had 
 no very good prospect of being established in busi- 
 ness as a lawyer. Miss White's father and some 
 of Lowell's own relatives regarded him as a young 
 man who would not make his own way in the 
 world. They did not know his genius, but Maria did 
 know it, and with the fidelity of a true woman she 
 believed in his future. I used to hear a good deal 
 about them in a circle of young people with whom 
 I was intimate, but who were younger than my- 
 self. Lowell had a kinsman in Boston who might 
 
35° 
 
 TRIBUTES TO THE POET. 
 
 have promoted his prospects at the bar ; but this 
 cousin of his always shook his head when James's 
 name was mentioned, and if any one had predicted 
 James's career in his presence, this cousin would 
 have been utterly incredulous. But this gentle- 
 man died before the young poet had gained much 
 reputation. I am not aware that Lowell owed his 
 success in any degree to any one but himself; still 
 I think he was not naturally an industrious man. 
 He had, I fancy, a propensity to idleness, which 
 he bravely overcame. Having witnessed the 
 whole of his career, I think I can say that the 
 estimate of it given by Canon Farrar is perfectly 
 just. 
 
 " Undoubtedly the greatest public service that 
 Mr. Lowell ever rendered consisted in what he 
 did to promote and cement the friendship between 
 the Government and people of Great Britain and 
 the Government and people of the United States. 
 We have had other ministers to England who 
 have done a good deal of this useful and beneficent 
 kind of work. But Lowell was in England at a 
 peculiar time, a time when it was necessary that 
 the work should be undertaken anew, because the 
 unpleasant feelings engendered by our Civil War 
 were not entirely worn out. For this task Lowell 
 was eminently fitted in every way. His genial 
 
TRIBUTES TO THE POET. 
 
 3SI 
 
 manners, his tact and his varied accomplishments 
 enabled him to fill with great success a difficult 
 post." 
 
 On receiving the news of Lowell's death, Mr. 
 Smalley cabled from London : " Mr. Lowell's posi- 
 tion here was unique. No American had ever 
 held — and in saying that I do not forget Motley 
 — quite the same relations to the English people. 
 None ever did quite the same service to his own 
 country. That, I think, is the eulogy which Mr_ 
 Lowell himself would have liked best of all. The 
 fire of his patriotism burned ever brighter and 
 brighter the longer he lived abroad. The one 
 thought uppermost in his mind was his country. 
 I say that as one who knew him long and well, 
 one to whom he talked freely on that and many 
 other subjects. His Americanism was the domi- 
 nant passion of his life ; that, and not poetry, nor 
 letters, nor even those friendships and affections 
 which were to him as the air he breathed." 
 
 "From 'Aldworth,' near Haslemere, Surrey, 
 Lord Tennyson telegraphed to London : ' England 
 and America will mourn Mr. Lowell's death. They 
 loved him and he loved them. Pray express for 
 myself and mine our sincerest sympathy with Mr. 
 Lowell's family.' 
 
 " Dr. Holmes was deeply affected by the death 
 
352 
 
 TRIBUTES TO THE POET. 
 
 of his old friend ; and so was Mr. Whittier. The 
 latter exclaimed : ' It is indeed a great loss to 
 American letters and to the world ' ; adding, ' I 
 knew Lowell when he was a young man just out 
 of college and reading law. He was a wonderful 
 fellow then, brilliant and witty. . . . His "Big- 
 low Papers " was a great work. It did much for 
 the abolition cause ; perhaps did as much to free 
 the slaves almost as Grant's guns. It aroused the 
 whole country.' 
 
 " Since Lowell's death the venerable poet has 
 composed these verses in his memory : 
 
 " From purest wells of English undefiled 
 None cleeper drank than he, the New World's child, 
 Who, in the language of their farm-fields spoke 
 The wit and wisdom of New England folk, 
 Shaming a monstrous wrong; the world-wide laugh 
 Provoked thereby might well have shaken half 
 The walls of slavery down ere yet the ball 
 And mine of battle overthrew them all." 
 
 "Lowell's interest in public affairs was," says 
 George William Curtis, " that of a clear-sighted 
 man who knew history and other nations, and had 
 the strongest faith in a government based upon 
 popular intelligence. The country never sent 
 abroad in the person of its minister a better 
 American. Spain and England saw in him not 
 
TRIBUTES TO THE POET. 
 
 353 
 
 only a man who,- by his literary genius, had con 
 ferred honor upon his country, but who showed 
 that the finest quality of manhood, a whole- 
 some commonsense, thoroughly trained and am- 
 ply equipped, was distinctively American, His 
 patriotism was not the brag of conceit nor the 
 blindness of ignorance, and the America of the 
 hope and faith of its noblest children was never 
 depicted with more searching insight than in his 
 plea for democracy spoken at a mechanics' insti- 
 tute while he was minister in England ; nor were 
 the manly independence and courtesy of the Amer- 
 ican character ever more finely illustrated than in 
 his essay upon 'a certain condescension in foreign- 
 ers.' It was a patriotism which did not admit that 
 arrogance and conceit and blatant self-assertion are 
 peculiarly American, nor insist that everything 
 American was for that reason better than every- 
 thing which was not American. It was never un- 
 mindful that the root of our political system and 
 of our national character was not aboriginally Amer- 
 ican, nor did it deny to the traditions of an older 
 civilization and to the life of older nations a charm 
 distinctively their own. Our literature has no 
 work more essentially American than the ' Biglow 
 Papers,' not only in the dialect form, but in its 
 dramatic portraiture of the popular conscience of 
 
354 TRIBUTES TO THE POET. 
 
 New England, of Lincoln's ' plain people ' who 
 have given the distinctive impulse to American 
 civilization, and from whose virtues has largely 
 sprung the American character. It is worth while 
 to lay stress upon this quality of Mr. Lowell, be- 
 cause it is the one to which much of his peculiar 
 influence is due, yet which is often overlooked or 
 denied. That influence sprang from the humanity 
 of his genius, his generous sympathy with noble 
 aspiration and endeavor, his political independence 
 and his steadfast fidelity to the high ideals of his 
 youth." 
 
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