"James Russell Lowell" by Charles Eliot Norton
 Harper’s New Monthly Magazine 86 (May, 1983)

The loss which America sustained in the death of Mr. Lowell in August, 1891, and of Mr. Curtis in August, 1892, was the loss of the two men who during their generation had most truly represented the ideals of American culture and citizenship. I say American culture and citizenship, because the type which they displayed was in certain marked respects novel, the product of conditions peculiar to our national institutions and life. They were men who by native gifts, by breeding, acquisitions, and manners, would have held a foremost place among the best in any land; but there was something in them which could have been acquired in no other country. They were "new births of our new soil," and their virtue drew nourishment from New England principles and New England practice. They were gentlemen as gracious, as refined, as well-bred as any of the line of gentlemen from Sidney down to Sidney's peers in the Old World to-day, but with this difference, that the sentiment which inspired them was not the lingering exclusive spirit of chivalric superiority, but the larger, more generous, modern spirit of democratic society, in which each man has the opportunity and is consequently under the responsibility to make the best of himself for the service of his fellow-men; and this spirit, natural to and embodied in such men as Lowell and Curtis, shows itself in character which seems to me to be, on the whole, of fairer and more promising quality than any which the world has hitherto known. The virtues of such men as these rest on a simple and secure foundation in human nature, not on convention or accident. They become, therefore, exemplary; they give reason for
faith in the progress of man. Kindness, sweetness, candor, generosity, are virtues which the least gifted man may practise; but in men with gifts of nature such as those possessed by the two friends of whom I am writing they become irresistibly winning and attractive.

It is not yet a year since Mr. Curtis delivered his Memorial Address on Lowell. It was to form the worthy close of that long series of addresses and orations in which Mr. Curtis, from his youth to his age, used his masterly powers as a public speaker for the enforcing of the higher lessons of patriotism. The discourse has become, alas! memorial in a double sense. The praise truly bestowed upon his friend applies also in large measure, with curious felicity of adaptation, to the speaker himself. Mr. Curtis dealt mainly with the public aspects of Lowell's life. In what I am now about to say I shall speak rather of its more private relations.

And yet I do so with reluctance and with difficulty. I cannot readily hold my friend aloof and write of him as a subject for critical analysis. I cannot take my readers, however worthy of confidence they may be, within the inner circle of intimacy, of which the charm would suffer were its sanctity violated and its seclusion disturbed. The poet may tell what he likes of his own emotions; he may claim the sympathy and enlarge the range of the emotions of common men by revealing to them his inner experiences of joy or sorrow. That is his right, and sometimes it is the very Muse herself who bids him do so. But it is an exclusive right. No other, not even a friend who sticketh closer than a brother, may draw away the veil. And yet so often is this done that we are losing the sense of the sacredness of the privacy of life. We submit to the vulgarizing of its loveliest enclosures, and we give prizes to the betrayers of confidence. There is an excellent passage about this in Mr. Lowell's lecture on Chapman. I would cite it all were it not that the readers of this Magazine have already had opportunity to see it. He asks: "Is it love of knowledge or of gossip that renders these private concerns so interesting to us, and makes us willing to intrude on the awful seclusion of the dead, or to flatten our noses against the windows of the Living?.... Of course in whatever the man himself has made a part of the record we are entitled to find what intimations we can of his genuine self, of the real man, veiled under the draperies of convention and circumstance, who was visible for so many years, yet perhaps never truly seen, obscurely known to himself, conjectured even by his intimates, and a mere name to all beside." These intimations of his genuine self, happily, are abundant in Lowell's writings, and alike more distinct and more trustworthy than is generally the case. There was nothing in him which he needed to conceal, and he maintained no reserves beyond the becoming reticences of a high, delicate, and sensitive nature. His books reveal him as he was, and a reader competent to interpret them would gather from them a just conception of the man. And yet the conception might not, after all, be complete. For in Lowell's case, more, I think, than in that of most writers of similar candor and frankness, what he wrote fails to convey an adequate impression of his genius, that is, of what in scholastic phrase may be called his potential genius. He was himself aware of this. He knew himself possessed of greater powers than he exercised. His genius had wings capable of higher, or at least of more sustained, flight than it ever adventured; and toward the end of his life the regret not seldom recurred to him that circumstance and temperament together had prevented him from making complete essay of the gifts with which nature had endowed him. "I feel," he wrote in 1884, "that my life has been mainly wasted, that I have thrown away more than most men ever had." There is in these words something of the exaggeration of a moment in which the sharpness of the contrast of actual achievement with the hopes, intentions, and ideals of life is deeply felt. In view of what he did, such words may seem unreasonable, but the regret which they express was justifiable. Fortune, kind to him in many ways, had refused to him at any time in his life the ample leisure and the freedom from care which, if not indispensable conditions of the free exercise of the poetic faculty, are essential to any long-sustained effort of the imagination.

Lowell has described, as no one else could do it, his own birthplace, and some of the conditions and aspects of the life of his boyhood. His description shows how remote that time was from this in which we are living. All the poets who during the last half-century have given form and expression to the popular American ideals, and who have quickened the poetic sensibility and invigorated the moral sentiment of the nation, were born and grew to manhood in what seems now a primitive age -- an age of greater simplicity and tranquility of life than our present day, of more untroubled faith, more political optimism, and of far narrower horizons. There were no railroads, with their tremendous revolutionary forces; no great manufacturing cities; no flood of immigrants; no modern democracy. Old forms of life and old traditions prevailed. The clergy still exercised authority, though it was steadily waning. The little New England villages and towns were independent communities, each with a character and pride of its own. The days before the advent of General Jackson are pleasant to look back upon. The nation was becoming slowly conscious of itself as a new birth of time; it was in the innocence of youth. It believed in itself. The millennium did not seem very far off -- except for the slaves in the Southern States. It was a time for poets.

The place as well as the time of Lowell's birth was fortunate. Cambridge, at least that part of it then and now known as Old Cambridge, was a pleasant village, just remote enough from Boston to preserve something of true rurality, but near enough to the city to share its wider interests and partake of the opportunities of its larger life. It had historic traditions of its own, capable of awakening the emotions of local patriotism, and touching the imagination of youth with the glow of local pride. It was the seat of the oldest and most renowned college in the land, and possessed not only such stores of ancient culture as two centuries had gathered, but also a body of men of learning and of character devoted to intellectual pursuits. They gave the tone to its simple society -- a society in which there was little wealth and no display, but much refinement and much knowledge.

From his father, who belonged to one of the most eminent families in the State, and was the beloved clergyman of a large parish in Boston, Lowell inherited a love of good letters, a conservative taste, a sense of dignity, and Puritan principles, though not the whole Puritan doctrine. His mother, whose ancestors were from the Orkney Islands, transmitted to him a poetic imagination, the love of nature, and a temperament sensitive, indolent, and aristocratic. The fairies who gathered round his cradle bestowed on him gifts in profusion -- health, good looks, humor, fancy, fun, a cheerful spirit, a pleasant disposition, strong common-sense. He had a happy childhood. His character developed naturally, under genial influences. He was a boy full of promise, but there was no precocity in him. He began to discover himself when he was in college, and to distinguish himself from his fellows. But he matured slowly. The first poems of his which seem to bear the Tower stamp are "Irene," and certain sonnets written in 1840, when he was twenty-one years old. From that time forward, under the influence of a happy love, his character and his genius alike developed rapidly.

Self-mastery, however, was more difficult for him than for most youths. The elements in his nature were so various and diverse that it was no easy task to bring them into harmony and shape them into a consistent character. His moral sense gradually asserted itself as the controlling force, and to this his poetic faculty and all his other intellectual powers became subordinated, but with no loss of legitimate independence and freedom of exercise.

In this predominance of the moral sense Lowell was a true son of New England and a true child of his time. The period from about 1830 to about 1850 was that in which New England was passing through its years of Sturm und Drang, corresponding with the change in the individual from youth to manhood. It had gone on in the old ways of childhood, with little restlessness, conforming itself to the traditions of the elders, till now it found itself full grown, and dressed in garments which no longer befitted its size and stature. Its character was solidly based on the Law of the Old Testament, but it had gradually found the limits of that Law too strait, and it sought for the freedom of the Gospel of the New. The Law had become for the New-Englander what it had been in the days of the Pharisees, and now, the voice of the Spirit was once more heard, and its message was caught by all sorts of hearers, wise and foolish. There were many prophets, some of them with little sense or sanity. But there were some, such as Garrison and Emerson, who were receiving and delivering the true message. The time was one of confusion, not merely intellectual, but moral -- a time of intense and conflicting emotions and opinions. With quick sensibilities and ready sympathies, Lowell was open to all its influences. But there was a struggle in his nature between the conservatism of his temperament, re-enforced by education as well as by domestic and social surroundings, and the radical drift of his poetic and reforming spirit. The struggle was sharp, but the issue was not doubtful. Obedient to the higher call, he joined the band of the new New-Englanders; he became an abolitionist, shared in the efforts of the Transcendentalists to enlarge the bounds of spiritual freedom, and sympathized even with some of the cruder efforts of the zealots of reform. Happily, he was protected from extravagance by his healthy humor. His keen but kindly perceptions, his excellent common-sense, served to keep his youthful ardor from any extreme course.

Lowell's spiritual experience in these years is plainly recorded in his poems. His real biography is written in them with a fullness and frankness which make them one of the most complete records in literature of the life of a young poet. From the remote themes dear to the fancy of youth, from the verses of love and of private experience, from the reflection on things at large, his poetry as he reaches full manhood becomes the expression of a poet giving utterance no longer to a merely personal sentiment, but to the dumb emotions and the convictions of a people. His engagement in 1840, and his marriage in 1844, to a woman of great personal charm, of uncommon poetic gifts, and of strong character, more mature at the time than his own, deepened and elevated his whole being. His wife shared his tastes, and confirmed all the moral instincts of his nature. His soul was stirred to its depths by the ominous events of the period, which marked the advance of the slave-power, and in the well-known series of his poems, written mainly in 1844 and immediately subsequent years, his voice became the voice of New England in indignant protest, in ardent appeal, and in confident reliance on those sturdy principles upon which she had been founded, and in which she still at bottom trusted. In 1846 came the first of the "Biglow Papers" -- "a squib of mine," as he called it in writing of it to a friend -- unexpected, unheralded, but a squib which betokened a new, incalculable force in American politics, and a new, permanent possession for American literature. The "Biglow Papers " revealed Lowell to his contemporaries, and in a measure to himself, by the reflection upon him of their effect upon the public. The vast variety of power manifest felt in them -- humor, wit, fun, knowledge, learning, common-sense, logic, patriotic fervor, all in the service of moral principle and political integrity -- displayed Lowell himself as a most striking figure.

Any one among the multitude of his gifts would have been enough to secure distinction, but in the diversity of his faculties and the amplitude of his rich and flexible intelligence he had no rival. No man was good at so many things as he. His love and knowledge of nature were not those of a poet alone, not of mere Wordsworthian sentiment, but such as showed, as Darwin long afterward said, to Lowell's great pleasure, that he had in him the making of a naturalist. But his love and knowledge of literature were also such as to show that he had in him the making of a great scholar. Yet such was his insight into affairs, such his capacity for dealing with the questions of politics, that it seemed as if this born poet and scholar and naturalist should not be left to the pursuits of the closet, the library, or the woods and fields, but should rather be brought into the crowded paths of public life. In everything his genius was superior to his gifts and master of his acquisitions. But his supreme distinction was of character; genius, faculties, acquisitions, were under the control of his moral sense, and all alike contributed to the building up of a character large, high, and strong. It was not as poet, or student, or thinker, or in any other limited relation of life, that those who knew him regarded him; it is not so that they think of him in memory, but as the large-natured, large-hearted, true, wise, and generous man, whose gifts and genius seemed rather the delightful accidents than the essentials of his vigorous and unique personality.

He was full of life and animal spirits. The "Fable for Critics," published in 1848, affords ample illustration of the liveliness and sparkling spontaneity of his wits, as well as of his critical discrimination and the wide range of his reading.*

* The Fable is likely to last longer than most such jeux d'esprit, not only for its intrinsic vitality, but as the most animated and truthful review of the chief figures on the stage of American literature in the middle of the century. An incident connected with its rhyming title-page gave Lowell a good deal of amusement. The last words on the page were,
"Set forth in October, the 31st day,
In the year '48, G. P. Putnam, Broadway."
The publisher removed his place of business shortly after the issue of the little volume, and, a new edition of it being called for, changed the concluding couplet of the title-page to,
"Set forth in October, the 31st day,
In the year '48, G- P. Putnam, 10 Park Place."

His spirits were constantly bubbling over in action as well as in writing. He enjoyed life thoroughly and in all its aspects. His bodily faculties were all at command, and served him well. He was no trained athlete, but he liked walking and swimming and skating, and could endure fatigue without harm. His eye was keen and true, his hand steady. He was a good shot, and he knew the excitement of the hunt, but he cared too much for the wild creatures to find great pleasure in killing them. To excel in everything he undertook was become a habit and an ambition with him. It was so in feats of bodily agility and strength. He liked to do whatever any one else could do. But he admired generously those who surpassed him. There was no jealousy in his nature. In camp in the Adirondacks in 1850 he acknowledged with unfailing admiration Stillman's marvellous skill in all woodcraft, his unerring sureness of aim, his mastery with axe, with oar, and with rifle. But here is a passage, hitherto unprinted, from Emerson's diary, which shows Lowell's emulous spirit in the woods. I am indebted for it to my friend Dr. Edward Emerson.

"August 7th, Follansbee's Pond. -- It should be called Stillman's henceforward, from the good camp which this gallant artist has built, and the good party he has led and planted here for the present at the bottom of the little bay which lies near the head of the lake. The lake is two miles long, one to one-half mile wide, and surrounded by low mountains. Norway pine and white pine abound. On the top of a large white pine in a bay was an osprey's nest, around which the ospreys were screaming, five or six. We thought there were young birds in it, and sent Preston (guide) to the top. This looked like an adventure. The tree might be 150 feet high at least; sixty feet clean, straight stein without a single branch, and, as Lowell and I measured it by the tape as high as we could reach, fourteen feet six inches in girth. Preston took advantage of a hemlock close by it, and climbed till he got on the branches; then went to the top of the pine, and found the nest empty, though the great birds wheeled and screamed about him. He said he could climb the bare stem of the pine, 'though it would be awful hard work.' When he came down I asked him to go up it a little way, which he did, clinging to the corrugations of the bark. Afterwards Lowell watched long for a chance to shoot the osprey, but he soared magnificently, and would not alight.... Lowell next morning was missing at breakfast, and when be came to camp told me he had climbed Preston's pine-tree."

Every pleasant quality that adds charm to social intercourse made Lowell among his intimates one of the most delightful of companions. His wit was as kindly as it was ready; his humor was always genial. "Pre-eminence," says one of the Elizabethans, "shortens all equality," but Lowell did not presume upon his superiorities. His tastes, his disposition, were aristocratic, but his principles, his faith, and his practice were thoroughly democratic. In this, as in all things, he was a genuine New-Englander, conservative on one side of his nature, liberal on the other; an idealist tempered by sturdy common-sense.

His affections were singularly deep and steady. He had not only a tender but a very large heart. His love for his friends was such that at times if it did not blind it at least colored his judgment. He was sure to like what they did. He was to them all that a faithful and generous friend could be. His thoughtfulness for them, his readiness to take trouble for them and to put all his resources at their disposal, out went the common rules and experience of friendship. In the more intimate relations of life, the depth, the soundness, the sweetness, and the simplicity of his nature secured happiness for himself and for those whom be loved.

His kindness to every one, even to those who had no special claim on him, was inexhaustible. Of money, or of time still more precious, he was lavish in the service of others, and he did not escape the penalty of his open-handedness. But he had no mercy for the knave and the hypocrite. For the charlatan in literature, the traitor or the swindler, the coward in politics, his lash was swift and stinging, and the punishment he administered was as severe as it was deserved.

His habitual mood was cheerful, often gay, but he had experience of the depressions of the poetic temperament and the anxieties of the sensitive fancy. There was no warning of these attacks of low spirits; they came suddenly, were of uncertain duration, and vanished as suddenly as they had come. They did not take the form of melancholy, but rather of nameless anxieties, vague forebodings, and a sense of failure and incapacity. At all times he was subject to distrust of the value of his own performance. When, after writing, the first glow of composition was past, he often needed the assurance of a friend that his work was good and worth doing.

There was a vein of shyness in him which, associated with this self-distrust, made appearance before the public distasteful to him. It was not till late in life that the evidence of his success and effect as a public speaker became too clear to allow him any longer to question his abilities in this respect. During the twenty years of his professorship its duties never became easy to him. He fulfilled them with scrupulous fidelity, but the stated hours and seasons of work were irksome to him and averse from his natural inclinations. "I begin," he says in a letter in 1867 -- "I begin my annual dissatisfaction of lecturing next Wednesday. I cannot get used to it. All my nightmares are of lecturing." But in spite of his dissatisfaction with it, and of the effort which his work as teacher cost him, his influence upon the students who followed his courses was deep and permanent, and his relations with them were always pleasant. There was nothing of the traditional pedagogic professor about him. He occupied rather the place toward the youth who had the advantage of his inspiring instruction of an elder student and friend, interested to secure their interest in the literature which he cared for, to broaden and to fertilize their minds, and to quicken within them the true love of letters, that it might become to them, as it was to him, one of the chief solamina vitae. He used to gather his classes in Dante around him in his study at Elmwood, and there in those rich hours his greatest service to them was not in expounding the "Divine Comedy," but in laying open to them the treasures of his full mind, in making them conscious of the relation of character with learning, of poetry with life, and of the pre-eminence of the things of the spirit over those of the flesh. The evenings thus spent, illumined by his pleasantry and made delightful by his pleasantness, remain in the recollection of some at least of his students as among the most memorable passages of their lives.

He was wont to complain of the indolence of his disposition, and to this extent he was right, that his natural habit of work was not continuous, but, on the contrary, spontaneous, rapid, with long breathing-spells between the periods of exertion. Yet he was never idle; and these intervals were not periods of self-indulgent inactivity, but were occupied in accumulation according to his liking, and in assimilation of fresh stores of observation and of learning. He was an immense reader. When the occasion came no man could work harder or with more intensity of energy and steadiness of industry than he, and such were the command he had over his faculties, and his facility of expression, that his performance was often a feat of marvelous rapidity. Thus, in 1848, "Sir Launfal" was written at a white heat within a week. And almost forty years later a considerable part of his discourse on "Democracy," delivered at Birmingham in October, 1884, was jotted down in the train on the journey from London. And yet so compact and well considered is this discourse that it seems as though no care in its preparation, no deliberation in its statement, had been wanting. Nor, indeed, were they; for this address, which has been well called an event, and an event without precedent, was the outcome of the reflections of a lifetime, and the expression of convictions matured by experience, and of character based upon the rock of firmly established principles.

The solidity of Lowell's intelligence was all the more impressive because of its alertness. All his faculties were swift in obedience to his call upon them, and all were assisted by a vigorous and well-trained memory, which served him not merely for the accumulation of knowledge and learning, but kept its great stores ready for instant use. The old allegory that memory is the mother of the Muses found illustration in his work. But memory nobly used is also the source of wisdom, and Lowell, while becoming from year to year more and more learned, became one of the wisest judges of literature and of life. As the boundaries of the domain of learning which he drained were extended, the fertilizing streams of his intellectual life ran ever deeper, clearer, and more abundant. His mind was continually growing, until there is no exaggeration in saying he became one of the largest-minded of men. But this largeness of mind was not more striking than the openness and candor of his nature. He never seemed hampered by prejudice or clouded by passion, and he was absolutely unaffected by self-interest. The strength of early association, the preciousness of venerable traditions, the force of innate sentiment, led him, as life went on, to shrink from adventuring on certain unknown oceans of thought on which many a fruitless voyage has been undertaken during this half-century. He preferred the known, the familiar courses. He could not shut his eyes to the effects which the advance of science has had in breaking down the old fences of faith, and in substituting for the authority of tradition
the liberty of speculation. But his heart clung to the ancient modes of belief, even while his intelligence recognized the truth that they were no longer defensible. His poem of "The Cathedral," and his later poems of "Quem Jovem Credidimus" and "The Oracle of the Gold Fishes," exhibit the spiritual conflict which went on within him between the forces of his intelligence and of his sentiment. "I find no fault," he once wrote, "with a judicious shutting of the eyes." And again, at a later date: "I continue to shut my eyes resolutely in certain speculative directions, and am willing to find solace in certain intimations that seem to me from a region higher than my reason. I went through my reaction so early and so violently that I have been settling backward towards equilibrium ever since. As I can't be certain, I won't be positive, and wouldn't drop some chapters of the Old Testament, even, for all the science that ever undertook to tell me what it doesn't know." He avoided discussion of such matters, and the poetic temperament asserted itself here over the logic of the understanding. "I am," he wrote, "very much in the state of mind of the Bretons who revolted against the revolutionary government, and wrote upon their banners, `Give us back our God.' I suppose I am an intuitionalist and there I mean to stick." But it was not easier for him than for most men of sense to stick there.

He never grew old. The spirit of youth was invincible in him. Life battered at the defences of youth with heavy artillery of trial and sorrow, but they did not yield. His healthy temperament resisted with success. The death of his first wife, after nine years of happy life, was a desperate grief. But it did not break him down, and after some years he married again, and renewed his happiness and his youth in so doing. From that time on for almost thirty years he remained one of the youngest-hearted of men. When he was sixty-two years old he declared that the figures were misplaced, they should read twenty-six; and in one of the last years of his life, as he was passing a hospital for incurable children, turning to his companion, he said, "There's where they'll send me one of these days." He was in his sixty-ninth year when he wrote:

"But life is sweet, though all that makes it sweet
Lessen like sound of friends' departing feet.
For me Fate gave, whate'er she else denied,
A nature sloping to the southern side."

And there the sun lay warm, and every morning renewed for him, with daily miracle, the youth of the world within him and without.

In reviewing the course of Lowell's life the most striking fact in its external experience appears in the contrast between the habits and occupations of the first fifty-eight years and those of the years which followed. Yet, though the contrast and the difference were great, there was no break of essential continuity between the two periods, for his powers were equal to every call upon them, and new duties only afforded new opportunity for the display of the abundant faculties with which nature had enriched him. Though the earlier and much the longer section of his life had been passed in comparative seclusion, suited to the poet, the scholar, and the man of letters, he was in spirit and interest always a public man. Through his antislavery poems, through the "Biglow Papers," through his prose essays upon contemporary politics in the Atlantic Monthly and the North American Review, he had exercised a strong and deep influence upon national opinion, and had shown a political wisdom which secured for his judgment upon affairs the respect not only of thinkers and students, but of the men actively engaged in public life. No record of the fateful period in the history of the United States from 1850 to 1870 can give a true representation of the course of opinion and of events without taking into account the quiet, steady, and powerful influence which lie exerted. His voice was the voice of the conscience, the good sense, and the wit of New England. It was not always widely heard, but it was heard by thousands whose consciences were re-enforced and whose opinions were shaped by it, and who witnessed to its teachings in their lives. It was one of the inspiring forces in the great conflict from which the people of the United States issued one undivided free nation.

In the pleasant retirement of his study at Elmwood, Lowell was hardly aware of the influence he was exerting. Social as he was by nature, and with gifts which made him the chief figure in whatever company he found himself, during great part of his life he saw little of the society of the large world. He loved his quiet, his home, his books, his little circle of friends. He seldom took part in social gatherings in Boston, except the monthly dinners of the Saturday Club, of which he has told in his poem in memory of Agassiz. He was seldom tempted from his regular pursuits, save to the home of some one of his few intimate friends. His welcome of them in his own study, and his lavish entertainment of them, made it one of the rare, sacred, and happy places in which the genius of friendship abides. The pleasant old-fashioned room, low-ceiled, its walls lined with chosen books, in the summer morning with its windows opening to the neighboring trees and the adjoining field, in the winter evening with its broad fireplace and the deep-throated roar of its chimney, the littered table, the busy-looking desk, the odds and ends of personal fancy or association that lay scattered about -- all wore the look of comfort and seclusion; the atmosphere was a happy mingling of the quiet indoor air of delightful studies, and the fresh open air of converse now laden with thought, now expanding with wit, and alive with mirth. It was a room which befitted the poet and the scholar, and in which he was at his best. For those who frequented it there was no room like it in the world.

The readers of Lowell's writings know his favorite books, and know, too, that there has seldom been one who was so friendly with his books as he. They represented their writers to him. It was not so much the old plays that he had on his shelves, but it was the old dramatists who were there; it was Dante, Shakespeare, Calderon, Donne, Walton, who were his familiars, and not merely their works with which he was acquainted. His books reflected his literary tastes. He was not a collector of rarities because of their rarity, but many volumes esteemed rare he had because they were the only or the best form of the work which he desired. There were few books in his study which were not excellent; some, indeed, there were perhaps not deserving that epithet, which he kept because of some association of friendship, or some quality of humor in them which gave them individuality and made them companionable. He had the habit of annotating the books he studied or for which he cared the most. He wrote out on the fly-leaves of some of them long lists of words unusual in form or sense, and the Introduction to the second series of the "Biglow Papers" shows how richly stored his memory had become with words and phrases from which to draw illustrations of the history, the significance, and worth of the elements of the language which is the vital soil of living thought. No other American writer has possessed a vocabulary so full, vigorous, and elastic as his. He loved words not for their own sake, but as the symbols of thought, for literary, not linguistic ends. The soundness of his learning was matched by the breadth of his scholarship. They are both strikingly displayed, in combination with clear evidence of his special literary tastes, in the address which he gave in 1859 to the Modern Language Association of America, at its meeting in Cambridge. He had for years been engaged in pursuits which interfered with the constant and regular pursuit of learned studies, but no professor devoted for life to his calling could have read a discourse richer in the treasures of the study, or fresher in its illustrations of mastery of wide and various fields of learning, or affording more abundant proof of a mind enlarged and strengthened by fruitful labor.

I have spoken already of the rapidity and irregularity of his habit of work. "Impatience of mind," he wrote in one of his letters, "is my bane.... I am too prone to extemporize." And again, "My great fault is impatience of revision." There was truth in this self-accusation. Many of his poems would have been better, and more sure to last, had he spent time on perfecting their form. Much of his prose was written with the printer's devil waiting in the hall for the unfinished page, or the college bell about to summon him before the ink of his lecture had had time to dry. The fault was natural to one whose powers were so ready and quick in action, and whose control over his intellectual resources was so complete. When he was at work no one of his faculties refused obedience. His power of concentration of his whole self upon the task in hand was such as I have known in no other man. He came from a spell of work lean as Dante himself, worn but not exhausted; the virtue which had gone out of him was speedily renewed.

From the life of the poet and the scholar, from the retirement of the study and the tranquil joys of a happy home, from a narrow circle of friends, and from scenes and occupations familiar and dear to him from childhood, he was suddenly, when near sixty years old, transferred to a new and strange stage by his appointment as minister to Spain. The recognition of the service he had rendered to the country was gratifying to him, and the relief from the exacting duties of the University was agreeable to him. The associations connecting the ministry to Spain with the literary history of his own country had for him a certain charm. He looked forward to the change of life with pleasure; but the wrench from his old ways was harder than he had anticipated. It was long before he became wonted to his new station, and for many months he was so homesick that but for his pride, and his sense of duty to the administration which had appointed him, he would have gladly thrown up his commission and returned to the shelter of Elrnwood, to his old friends and trees and books. He gradually became wonted to his new position, and interested in the calls which it made upon him, and the opportunities it afforded for the exercise of talents which had lain dormant at home. It was at least worth while to stay in order to learn Spain and Spanish more thoroughly. He had been in Spain about two years and a half when, in 1880, he was transferred as minister to London.

Here a new life opened to him, from the beginning full of interest. The relations between England and our own country are such that questions are constantly arising between the two governments which require to be handled with discretion and tact on both sides to prevent their becoming vexatious sources of irritation, and degenerating from matters of reasonable argument into subjects of dispute. It would have been difficult, nay, impossible, to find a man more completely fitted than Lowell with the qualities requisite for successful dealing with such questions, so far as they fall within the province of diplomacy. American, heart, blood, and bone, thoroughly understanding his own people, proud of his country, ardent in the maintenance of her rights, he was no narrow patriot, but large-minded enough to understand and appreciate the spirit of another nation not less high-spirited than his own, and just enough to recognize the equities on both sides of conflicting interests. Versed as few men are in the history of both countries, with an intimate knowledge of the contemporary politics of both, he felt and shared the susceptibilities and the difficulties of each. He had resented with generous indignation the affronts offered and the wrongs done to America by the arrogance and the insouciance of English statesmen. He had retorted with impatient and even bitter humor on the offensive tone of superiority assumed at times by inferior English-men, alike in public and in private. But England was still to him the mother-country of his own, and his love for her was only second to that which he bore to his native land. Her offences toward America he felt the more deeply because he felt them as wrongs done to herself, and as hurts to the causes which the good men in both countries have equally at heart -- the causes of peace, liberty, and good government. He felt them the more deeply because they aggravated the evil dispositions of his own people. No duties could have been more acceptable to him than those involved in the endeavor to bring the two nations to a solid footing of mutual respect, mutual understanding, and mutual affection. It was his good fortune to find during his term of service in England a Minister of Foreign Affairs capable of appreciating his spirit and ready to respond to it.

His reputation had preceded him to England, and he was received alike by the government, by society, and by the people at large with a frank cordiality which at once gratified and inspirited him. The old home became a new home to him. His position called upon him for the exercise of faculties for the display of which there had been no opportunities in his earlier life, and again he showed himself master of every new occasion. He found himself for the first time in a society of hereditary social training, full of accomplishment and disciplined intelligence, with large relations with the world, and possessed at its best of high breeding and cosmopolitan breadth of interest, and in this society he found his natural element as a man of the world. Mr. Curtis well said of him, he was " much more than his Excellency the Ambassador of American Literature to the Court of Shakespeare, as the London Spectator called him upon his arrival in London," he was " the representative to England of an American scholarship, a wit, an intellectual resource, a complete and splendid accomplishment, a social grace and charm, a felicity of public and private speech, and a weight of good sense which pleasantly challenged England to a continuous and friendly bout, in which America did not suffer." But he was still more than this; he was the personal representative of what was best in American institutions and American ideas. He interpreted them in his own life and nature. Embodied in him they were better understood and more respected. He was America incarnate.

No other American has served his country abroad so fully in the same way. Each year of his residence in England added to his influence for good. He should have been perpetual minister. He was fortunate, however, in his successor, who found his position at once the easier and the more difficult because Lowell had preceded him.

In the last year of his residence in England the heaviest stroke which fate could deal fell upon him in the death of his wife -- a woman worthy to be his wife. He returned home in the early summer of 1885, but not to Elmwood. Elmwood was now too solitary and too full of ghosts. In the course of that summer he came to stay with me at Ashfield, and he spoke at the annual August village festival. There have been many striking words said at those festivals, but there are two speeches which stand out above all others in the memory of those who heard them, and which no one of the little audience that listened to them is likely ever to forget. The first is this of Lowell's. It was the first word that he had spoken in public since his return to has own land after his eight years' absence. He was deeply moved; his rich voice was tremulous with feeling. He spoke for hardly five minutes, but it was long enough in which to tell of what he had tried to do for his country, and of the sad happiness of his return to her, and of the depth of his love for her. The whole strain was in a pure, lofty key, which led up to his closing words: "Entreat me not to leave thee, for where thou lodgest I will lodge; thy people shall be my people, and thy God my God; and where thou diest will I die, and there will I be buried." The other speech to be remembered with this was some years after, when Curtis, moved as he was seldom moved by the wrong done to the great figure of Lowell by some of those wanton and insolent critics who had charged him with being un-American, broke into a burst of spontaneous and magnificent eloquence in the delineation of the true American, and in the description of his friend as the type of what the American should be. The spirit of patriotism and of friendship inspired and exalted him, and in no crowded theatre and at no splendid banquet had his hearers ever listened breathless to a more superb and impressive display of a genius whose inspiration was drawn from the sweet fountains of a pure and lofty soul.

The later years of Lowell's life were full of good work, as the earlier ones had been. He was recognized as the highest representative of American letters and life. He fell back for resource of occupation on his old studies. He was chosen as its spokesman for his University on occasion of its two-hundred-and-fiftieth anniversary. He spoke not infrequently on other occasions of public interest. He gave the brief course of lectures, full of literary excellence and of mature reflection, on the Old English Dramatists, with which the readers of this Magazine are already acquainted. From time to time he wrote new poems. But his life was too broken to allow of the free flow of the current of poetry, though when it flowed it was no less clear and deep than of old. He made frequent summer visits to England. He was much with his friends. In 1889 he returned to live at Elmwood, once more made habitable for him by the presence of his daughter and her children. There, where he was born and where he desired to die, he died in August, 1891.

The record of Lowell's life in his published works affords, as I have said, a faithful picture of him. But the record in them is not complete, and it is soon to be partially filled out by the publication of his letters, in which this man, who had a most public soul, is shown in his private relations with the friends toward whom his pulse beat even in the dark. In regard to these letters I am tempted to use Sir Toby Matthews's words in the Introduction to his Collection of Letters: "I hold these letters, at least, to speak a true English tongue, which is not too general even in this time; and they express themselves naturally and nobly enough, considering that they are not written but in the familiar way; and some of them, I confess, I think to be as good as ever I saw." In one of them, written in 1848, Lowell says, " I love above all other reading the early letters of men of genius"; but if he had had his own letters to read, he would have found the late almost as good reading as the early.