CHAPTER X

LOWELL AND THE WAR FOR THE UNION

1858-1865

When the _Atlantic Monthly_ was founded, its conductors did not conceal their intention to make it a political magazine. It bore as its sub-head a title it has never relinquished, “A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics.” The combination under Lowell’s superintendence did not denote that articles were to be grouped under these heads; it intimated that in the attitude taken by the magazine both art and politics were to be discussed by men having the literary faculty, and that apprehension of subjects which finds its natural training not exclusively in practice and affairs but in acquaintance with great literature which is, after all, the express image of art and politics. Thus, the magazine did not become, as it might in lesser hands, a mere propaganda of reform, or the organ of a political party, neither did it assume the air of philosophical absenteeism. If one examines the early numbers he is struck with the preponderance of imaginative literature aid of that artistic element which finds expression in historical narrative or in the essay. The space given to discussion of affairs is not considerable, but evidently the subjects are chosen with deliberation, and they are treated if not with distinction yet with a good deal more than merely newspaper care.

Such articles are found at the latter end of the magazine, a place indeed naturally adapted to them, since in the practice of printing opportunity would thus be given for the latest possible consideration of current events; still, though the latest articles in the successive numbers, they were written at least a month, and more likely six weeks or two months even before they could come into the hands of readers, so that the authors were compelled to see things in the large far more than writers who might change their judgments over night on the receipt of a telegram.

These articles, corresponding, as far as a monthly could parallel a daily, to the leader of a journal, were usually one to a number. In the November, 1857, _Atlantic_, the first to be issued, was “The Financial Flurry,” by Mr. Parke Godwin, who had been an important writer on the staff of _Putnam’s Monthly_. In December appeared “Where will it End?” by Edmund Quincy, an enquiry into the outcome of slavery in America, somewhat in the nature of that gentleman’s contributions to the _Anti-Slavery Standard_, when he and Lowell were associated there, though somewhat more moderate in manner. It was vigorous, pointed, and a reasonable summary of the situation politically, but it was an appeal to fundamental principles, not to temporary political conditions. In January Mr. Godwin again wrote the political leader, this time on “The President’s Message,” which had been delivered by Mr. Buchanan at the coming together of Congress early in December, and the paper could therefore be regarded as a prompt consideration of the policy of the new administration. The article was brief and passed in review the three main topics of the currency, our foreign relations, and the Kansas-Nebraska difficulties. In February Mr. Godwin took up more in detail an examination of the Kansas Usurpation; there was no political article in March, but in April Lowell took a hand in a characteristic fashion.

Mr. Buchanan had been in office a year, and the momentous hour was approaching when the forces for and against the Union, with all that the Union stood for in the progress of freedom, were to be marshalled. The preliminary test of strength was already offered in Kansas, and the moral and intellectual debate was apparent in Washington. The principles for which the _Atlantic_ stood were those for which the _Anti-Slavery Standard_ had stood ten years before, but Lowell was now on a broader platform, since the _Atlantic_ represented freedom, history, law, and civilization, where the _Standard_ had represented the attack upon a pernicious system. Mr. Godwin was again called on to review the first year of the Buchanan administration, which he did in an article of about eight _Atlantic_ pages, with the caption “Mr. Buchanan’s Administration.” The review was methodical and severe. It examined the record upon four leading points, the Mormon question, the Financial question, the Filibuster question, and the Kansas question. Mr. Godwin, a trained journalist of the older school, a man of resources in reading and scholarship, and a vigorous thinker, handled his subject with skill and analyzed the situation with clearness, giving the results in an incisive manner. The article accomplished what it set out to do, and is a capital example of a shrewd, forcible political leader.

Then Lowell took up the parable, and it is hardly likely that any observant reader of the April _Atlantic_ failed to note that in stepping over the white line which separated the first eight from the latter six pages of the article, he had passed from the domain of one writer to that of another. It is quite as likely that, however he may have been impressed with the good sense and virility of the former part of the article, he was not so piqued by curiosity to know who wrote it, as he was in the case of the latter part, for that portion is instinct with a vivid personal note. If the reader of that day were familiar with Lowell’s political writings of ten years before, he would not fail to attribute these pages to the editor of the magazine. The same note is struck in each, though the insouciance of wit is somewhat hidden by a fiery earnestness here, as if the author could not stop to play by the way, as he was wont to do when the political thunder-clouds were not gathering so ominously in the west.

Lowell did not preserve his share of the article among his “Political Essays,” and this is not strange, not only because his writing was a detachment of a fuller article, but because with all its undoubted eloquence it was not so careful and rounded a piece of work as his later essays in the same field. In the absence of any correspondence on the subject, it is reasonable to conjecture that, having received Mr. Godwin’s article and assigned it to the number, he was constrained to think that forcible as it was in its indictment of Mr. Buchanan’s administration for errors and blunders, it might well afford the starting-point for a further arraignment, not of the administration in particular but of the nation itself so far as that was _particeps criminis_ with the administration in its rôle of attorney for the slave-power.

But any such indictment as this must be drawn under the provisions of the moral law and find its precedents in history, and make its appeal to the conscience of the people as the final court. Into this business, therefore, Lowell threw himself with vehemence. He knew his own country’s history, he knew also the history of man; and the moral ardor, the almost prophetic power which had been both his inheritance, and the characteristic of his early manhood when he was almost persuaded to be a Reformer, now flamed out. It was as if he had been storing energy during the ten years of comparative silence since the issue of the “Biglow Papers” and the contributions to the _Standard_.

“Looking at the administration of Mr. Buchanan,” he begins, “from the point of view of enlightened statesmanship” (which was Mr. Godwin’s), “we find nothing in it that is not contemptible; but when we regard it as the accredited exponent of the moral sense of a majority of our people, it is saved from contempt, indeed, but saved only because contempt is merged in a deeper feeling of humiliation and apprehension. Unparallelled as the outrages in Kansas have been, we regard them as insignificant in comparison with the deadlier fact that the Chief Magistrate of the Republic should strive to defend them by the small wiles of a village attorney,--that, when the honor of a nation and the principle of self-government are at stake, he should show himself unconscious of a higher judicature or a nobler style of pleading than those which would serve for a case of petty larceny,--and that he should be abetted by more than half the national representatives, while he brings down a case of public conscience to the moral level of those who are content with the maculate safety which they owe to a flaw in an indictment, or with the dingy innocence which is certified to by the disagreement of a jury.”

Regarding this as a logical consequence of the profound national demoralization which followed the enactment of the Fugitive Slave Bill, and warming to his subject as he rehearses that deplorable business, he clears the way for his first proposition, by which he aims to lift the discussion into the higher air of history and elemental morality. “The capacity of the English race for self-government,” he proceeds, “is measured by their regard as well for the forms as the essence of law. A race conservative beyond all others of what is established, averse beyond all others to the heroic remedy of forcible revolution, they have yet three times in the space of a century and a half assumed the chances of rebellion and the certain perils of civil war, rather than submit to have Right infringed by Prerogative, and the scales of Justice made a cheat by false weights that kept the shape but lacked the substance of legitimate precedent. We are forced to think that there must be a bend sinister in the escutcheon of the descendants of such men, when we find them setting the form above the substance, and accepting as law that which is deadly to the spirit while it is true to the letter of legality. It is a spectacle portentous of moral lapse and social disorganization, to see a statesman, who has had fifty years’ experience of American politics, quibbling in defence of Executive violence against a free community, as if the conscience of the nation were no more august a tribunal than a police justice sitting upon a paltry case of assault.... There is a Fate which spins and cuts the threads of national as of individual life, and the case of God against the people of these United States is not to be debated before any such petty tribunal as Mr. Buchanan and his advisers seem to suppose.”

The difficulty, Lowell sees, is in the lack of any organized public sentiment, and thus in the weakness of the sense of responsibility. “The guilt of every national sin comes back to the voter in a fraction, the denominator of which is several millions,” and the need is of a thorough awakening of the individual conscience. It is the moral aspect of the great question before the country which is cardinal, yet the moral must go hand in hand with common sense, and Lowell contrasts the solidarity of the South, created by the gravitation of private interest, with the perpetual bickering of the Northern enemies of slavery amongst themselves. He calls for less scrutiny of the character of the allies the anti-slavery people draw to themselves, and more political forethought and practical sense. “The advantage of our opponents has been that they have always had some sharp practical measure, some definite and immediate object, to oppose to our voluminous propositions of abstract right. Again and again the whirlwind of oratorical enthusiasm has roused and heaped up the threatening masses of the Free States, and again and again we have seen them collapse like a waterspout into a crumbling heap of disintegrated bubbles before the compact bullet of political audacity.[1] While our legislatures have been resolving and re-resolving the principles of the Declaration of Independence, our adversaries have pushed their trenches, parallel after parallel, against the very citadel of our political equality.”

Hence he calls for an offensive attitude on the part of the lovers of freedom. “Are we to be terrified any longer,” he asks, “by such Chinese devices of warfare as the cry of Disunion,--a threat as hollow as the mask from which it issues, as harmless as the periodical suicides of Mantalini, as insincere as the spoiled child’s refusal of his supper? We have no desire for a dissolution of our confederacy, though it is not for us to fear it. We will not allow it: we will not permit the Southern half of our dominion to become a Hayti. But there is no danger; the law that binds our system of confederate stars together is of stronger fibre than to be snapped by the trembling finger of Toombs or cut by the bloodless sword of Davis; the march of the Universe is not to be stayed because some gentleman in Buncombe declares that his sweet-potato patch shall not go along with it. The sweet attraction which knits the sons of Virginia to the Treasury has lost none of its controlling force. We must make up our minds to keep these deep-descended gentlemen in the Union, and must convince them that we have a work to accomplish in it and by means of it. If our Southern brethren have the curse of Canaan in their pious keeping, if the responsibility lie upon them to avenge the insults of Noah, on us devolves a more comprehensive obligation and the vindication of an elder doom;--it is for us to assert and to secure the claim of every son of Adam to the common inheritance ratified by the sentence, ‘In the sweat of thy brow shalt thou earn thy bread.’ We are to establish no aristocracy of race or complexion, no caste which nature and Revelation alike refuse to recognize, but the indefeasible right of man to the soil which he subdues, and the muscles with which he subdues it. If this be a sectional creed, it is a sectionality which at least includes three hundred and fifty-nine degrees of the circle of man’s political aspiration and physical activity, and we may as well be easy under the imputation.”

The contempt with which Lowell treats the renewed threats of secession illustrates the blindness which he shared with most of his friends, and it is not likely that in after years he would have been so confident that the South had no higher principles mingled with the baser ones of love of prosperity and power. The “bloodless sword” of Davis also gave way in his phrase to the “drippin’ red han’,” and the deep gravity of war caused him to strike profounder notes. But it is not easy for men of this generation to realize the galling sense of humiliation which the men of Lowell’s day felt at the manner in which the general government was made subservient to the demands of the slave power. So conscious were they of the steady degeneration of the political sense, that they were scarcely aware of the counter force of the rising tide of anti-slavery and union sentiment, so that the great wave which swept over the North after the attack upon Sumter came with almost as much a surprise to them as to the South.

It is in confession of this political degeneracy that the article proceeds, and Lowell lashes his countrymen with scorn for it, but he refuses to believe that this is to be the fate of the republic. “When we look back upon the providential series of events which prepared this continent for the experiment of Democracy,--when we think of those forefathers for whom our mother England shed down from her august breasts the nutriment of ordered liberty, not unmixed with her best blood in the day of her trial,--when we remember the first two acts of our drama, that cost one king his head and his son a throne, and that third which cost another the fairest appanage of his crown and gave a new Hero to mankind,--we cannot believe it possible that this great scene, stretching from ocean to ocean, was prepared by the Almighty only for such men as Mr. Buchanan and his peers to show their feats of juggling on, even though the thimble-rig be on so colossal a scale that the stake is a territory larger than Britain. We cannot believe that this unhistoried continent,--this virgin leaf in the great diary of man’s conquest over the planet, on which our fathers wrote two words of epic grandeur,--Plymouth and Bunker Hill,--is to bear for its colophon the record of men who inherited greatness and left it pusillanimity,--a republic, and made it anarchy--freedom, and were content as serfs,--of men who, born to the noblest estate of grand ideas and fair expectancies the world had ever seen, bequeathed the sordid price of them in gold. The change is sad ’twixt now and then; the Great Republic is without influence in the councils of the world; to be an American, in Europe, is to be the accomplice of filibusters and slave-traders; instead of men and thought, as was hoped of us, we send to the Old World cotton, corn, and tobacco, and are but as one of her outlying farms. Are we basely content with our pecuniary good-fortune? Do we look on the tall column of figures on the credit side of our national ledger as a sufficing monument of our glory as a people? Are we of the North better off as provinces of the Slave-holding States than as colonies of Great Britain? Are we content with our share in the administration of national affairs, because we are to have the ministry to Austria, and because the newspapers promise that James Gordon Bennett shall be sent out of the country to fill it?”

The subordination of the Free States in the administration of the government is traced to the moral disintegration which has set in, and after a recital in incisive terms of the act in subversion of true democracy which they have been compelled to witness, he closes with this appeal: “It lies in the hands of the people of the Free States to rescue themselves and the country by peaceable reform, ere it be too late, and there be no remedy left but that dangerous one of revolution, toward which Mr. Buchanan and his advisers seem bent on driving them.... Prosperity has deadened and bewildered us. It is time we remembered that History does not concern herself about material wealth,--that the life-blood of a nation is not that yellow tide which fluctuates in the arteries of Trade,--that its true revenues are religion, justice, sobriety, magnanimity, and the fair amenities of Art,--that it is only by the soul that any people has achieved greatness and made lasting conquests over the future. We believe there is virtue enough left in the North and West to infuse health into our body politic; we believe that America will reassume that moral influence among the nations which she has allowed to fall into abeyance; and that our eagle, whose morning-flight the world watched with hope and expectation, shall no longer troop with unclean buzzards, but rouse himself and seek his eyrie to brood new eaglets that in time shall share with him the lordship of these Western heavens, and shall learn of him to shake the thunder from their invincible wings.”

The merits and the defects of Lowell’s political writings appear in this article. There is the divination of the real question, the reference to moral principles, and the witty phrase; but also there is that sort of coruscation of language which tends to conceal point and application. The writing is that of a good talker rather than of a good pleader. The very breadth of the play of mind in Lowell militated against directness of attack. He finds the seat of the difficulty not in this or that political blunder, but in a disintegration of the public conscience which had long been going on, and he sees no remedy for this but in the arousing of the individual responsibility. It is the voice of the preacher, and even so not of the crusading preacher.

He was more in his own field when writing the article on “The American Tract Society,” since here his wit and satire were engaged on a theme where fundamental morals and expediency were at issue, and two articles which followed on Rufus Choate and Caleb Cushing[2] had the incisiveness of brilliant newspaper work, and a breadth not to be looked for in a newspaper. “Phillips [the publisher] was so persuaded,” he writes to Mr. Norton after the first had appeared, “of the stand given to the magazine by the Choate article that he has been at me ever since for another. So I have written a still longer one on Cushing. I think you will like it--though, on looking over the Choate article this morning, I am inclined to think that on the whole the better of the two. Better as a whole, I mean, for there are passages in this beyond any in that, I think. These personal things are not such as I should choose to do, for they subject me to all manner of vituperation; but one must take what immediate texts the newspapers afford him, and I accepted the responsibility in accepting my post.”

It must be remembered that these articles were written two or three years before the great crisis was reached, and when in the minds of nearly all public men the question was one of everlasting debate, not yet of action, except so far as the debate found concrete expression in the struggle for possession in Kansas. In writing these personal papers Lowell therefore was using his scorn and satire in defence of the political idealists of whom he was one, and in attack of the political trimmers of whom he took Choate and Cushing as representatives. Yet even in these papers he recurs again and again to those fundamental political questions which underlie all notions of persons and parties. This is especially evident in the conclusion of the article on Caleb Cushing.

“The ethical aspects of slavery,” he contends, “are not and cannot be the subject of consideration with any party which proposes to act under the Constitution of the United States. Nor are they called upon to consider its ethnological aspect. Their concern with it is confined to the domain of politics, and they are not called to the discussion of abstract principles, but of practical measures. The question, even in its political aspect, is one which goes to the very foundation of our theories and our institutions. It is simply, shall the course of the Republic be so directed as to subserve the interests of aristocracy or of democracy? Shall our territories be occupied by lord and serf or by intelligent freemen? by laborers who are owned, or by men who own themselves? The Republican party has no need of appealing to prejudice or passion. In this case there is a meaning in the phrase, ‘Manifest Destiny.’ America is to be the land of the workers, the country where, of all others, the intelligent brain and skilled hand of the mechanic, and the patient labor of those who till their own fields, are to stand them in greatest stead. We are to inaugurate and carry on the new system which makes Man of more value than Property, which will one day put the living value of industry above the dead value of capital. Our republic was not born under Cancer, to go backward. Perhaps we do not like the prospect? Perhaps we love the picturesque charm with which novelists and poets have invested the old feudal order of things? That is not the question. This New World of ours is to be the world of great workers and small estates. The freemen whose capital is their two hands must inevitably become hostile to a system clumsy and barbarous like that of Slavery, which only carries to its last result the pitiless logic of selfishness, sure at last to subject the toil of the many to the irresponsible power of the few.”

In these papers Lowell again separated himself instinctively from the extreme Abolitionists, the men, that is, who concentrated their attention exclusively upon the sin of slavery, and refused to use any political weapons for the overthrow of the system. He did not delay much over the economic aspects of the matter, but based his attacks almost wholly upon the eternal principles of Freedom. It was for Freedom, almost as a personal figure, that he had been a free lance from his youth, and he had come in his manhood to identify freedom with his country till he had a passionate jealousy for the fair name of the nation. He was not blind to the inconsistency which slavery created, but he refused to accept slavery as a permanent condition, and was strenuous in his belief that the fundamental, historical, and prophetic life of the nation was aggressively free, and made for freedom.

Hence he identified himself with the Republican party, in its early days, with cheerful alacrity, supporting it by his pen and his vote, and hence, also, as the lines were drawn more closely at the time of the election of Mr. Lincoln, his political articles in the _Atlantic_ became more direct and more charged with a statesmanlike rather than with a merely opportune character. In October, 1860, he printed a paper on “The Election in November,” which is preserved in his “Political Essays.” It is a survey of the field on the eve of the great election, in which he aims to present the issue clearly. He finds it in the death struggle of the slaveholding interest, which has so long dominated national politics, but it is to him not a question of political preponderancy, but of the moral integrity of the non-slaveholding States. “We believe,” he says, “that this election is a turning-point in our history; for, although there are four candidates, there are really, as everybody knows, but two parties, and a single question that divides them.... The cardinal question on which the whole policy of the country is to turn--a question, too, which this very election must decide in one way or the other--is the interpretation to be put upon certain clauses of the Constitution.” After a witty analysis of the parties which trade most in the term “conservative,” he makes a keen inquiry into the basis of Southern civilization, with the purpose of considering what degree of permanence there is in the society which rests on it, and reaches the conclusion that “in such communities the seeds of an ‘irrepressible conflict’ are surely, if slowly, ripening, and signs are daily multiplying that the true peril to their social organization is looked for, less in a revolt of the owned labor than in an insurrection of intelligence in the labor that owns itself and finds itself none the richer for it. To multiply such communities is to multiply weakness. The election in November turns on the single and simple question, Whether we shall consent to the indefinite multiplication of them; and the only party which stands plainly and unequivocally pledged against such a policy, nay, which is not either openly or impliedly in favor of it;--is the Republican party.”

It is interesting to note that Lowell frankly expresses in this article his regret that Lincoln instead of Seward should have been selected as candidate for the presidency. He saw in Seward a reasonable and persistent exponent of the cardinal doctrines of the party, and hence he wished him at the front as the most conspicuous representative. “It was assumed that his nomination would have embittered the contest, and tainted the Republican creed with radicalism; but we doubt it. We cannot think that a party gains by not hitting its hardest, or by sugaring its opinions. Republicanism is not a conspiracy to obtain office under false pretences. It has a definite aim, an earnest purpose, and the unflinching tenacity of profound conviction.” Evidently he had not yet, as very few at the East had, made the acquaintance of Mr. Lincoln, but he accepts the nomination with confidence. “Mr. Lincoln,” he says, “has proved both his ability and his integrity; he has had experience enough in public affairs to make him a statesman, and not enough to make him a politician.... He represents a party who know that true policy is gradual in its advances, that it is conditional and not absolute, that it must deal with facts and not with sentiments, but who know also that it is wiser to stamp out evil in the spark than to wait till there is no help but in fighting fire with fire. They are the only conservative party, because they are the only one that is not willing to pawn to-morrow for the means to gamble with to-day. They have no hostility to the South, but a determined one to doctrines of whose ruinous tendency every day more and more convinces them.” And again he emphatically declares of the members of the party which he believes about to triumph at the polls: “They believe that slavery is a wrong morally, a mistake politically, and a misfortune practically, wherever it exists; that it has nullified our influence abroad and forced us to compromise with our better instincts at home; that it has perverted our government from its legitimate objects, weakened the respect for the laws by making them the tools of its purposes, and sapped the faith of men in any higher political morality than interest or any better statesmanship than chicane. They mean in every lawful way to hem it within its present limits.”

Lowell confessed in a letter to Mr. Nordhoff,[3] written a few weeks after the election, when it will be remembered there was very little evidence to show that the Republican party had not recoiled from its own success, that he was greatly puzzled to gauge the actual mind of the public. “But one thing seems to me clear,” he says, “that we have been running long enough by dead reckoning, and that it is time to take the height of the sun of righteousness.” It was the time of Buchanan’s attitude of helplessness, the logical result of a life spent in adjustment of principle to occasion. “Is it the effect of democracy,” Lowell asks, “to make all our public men cowards? An ounce of pluck just now were worth a king’s ransom. There is one comfort, though a shabby one, in the feeling that matters will come to such a pass that courage will be forced upon us, and that when there is no hope left we shall learn a little self-confidence from despair. That in such a crisis the fate of the country should be in the hands of a sneak! If the Republicans stand firm we shall be saved, even at the cost of disunion. If they yield, it is all up with us and with the experiment of democracy.”

When he wrote this letter, he had already written and indeed printed his paper on “The Question of the Hour” in the _Atlantic_ for January, 1861. However apparently inert and even dazed the North might be, and however paralyzed the federal government, there was little indecision at the South. South Carolina had already taken steps to “withdraw from the Union,” and the Southern public men were in a high state of activity. In this article, which has not been reprinted, Lowell considers briefly the possibility of disunion through the action of the South. He is somewhat incredulous of the imminence of this danger, and the real question of the hour to him is whether the Free States, having taken a stand for freedom, will maintain their self-possession and spirit. He groans over the miserable straits to which the nation is reduced by having at its head in this critical hour a man of such mediocrity as Mr. Buchanan. Again he makes his familiar point that the political training of the party in power has caused a distinct degeneration in politics, and thus has brought about a state of things which renders resistance to the treasonable conduct of the leaders of secession weak and ineffective; and he points out with sagacity a source of weakness, which nearly a generation later was to draw from him a new political moral.

“It has been the misfortune of the United States that the conduct of their public affairs has passed more and more exclusively into the hands of men who have looked on politics as a game to be played rather than as a trust to be administered, and whose capital, whether of personal consideration or of livelihood, has been staked on a turn of the cards. A general skepticism has been induced, exceedingly dangerous in times like these. The fatal doctrine of rotation in office has transferred the loyalty of the numberless servants of the Government, and of those dependent on or influenced by them, from the nation to a party. For thousands of families, every change in the National Administration is as disastrous as revolution, and the Government has thus lost that influence which the idea of permanence and stability would exercise in a crisis like the present. At the present moment, the whole body of office-holders at the South is changed from a conservative to a disturbing element by a sense of the insecurity of their tenure. Their allegiance having always been to the party in power at Washington, and not to the Government of the Nation, they find it easy to transfer it to the dominant faction at home.”

Even granting that the secessionists carry out their schemes, the losers, he points out, would not be the Free States. “The laws of trade cannot be changed, and the same causes which have built up their agriculture, commerce, and manufactures will not cease to be operative. The real wealth and strength of states, other things being equal, depends upon homogeneousness of population and variety of occupation, with a common interest and common habits of thought. The cotton-growing States, with their single staple, are at the mercy of chance. India, Australia, nay Africa herself, may cut the thread of their prosperity. Their population consists of two hostile races, and their bone and muscle, instead of being the partners, are the unwilling tools of their capital and intellect. The logical consequence of this political theory is despotism, which the necessity of coercing the subject race will make a military one.”

A month later the situation had become still more serious, and in his article “E Pluribus Unum,” which is reprinted in “Political Essays,” Lowell writes with an earnestness which appears even in the wit and humor that play over the surface. After discussing with an impatient scorn the sophisms of secession, he inquires if any new facts have come to light since the election which would lead the people to reconsider the resolution then made. “Since the election of Mr. Lincoln, not one of the arguments has lost its force, not a cipher of the statistics has been proved mistaken, on which the judgment of the people was made up.” And then, after reaffirming the limitations of the power to be assumed by the Republican party, he bursts forth:--

“But the present question is one altogether transcending all limits of party and all theories of party policy. It is a question of national existence; it is a question whether Americans shall govern America, or whether a disappointed clique shall nullify all government now, and render a stable government difficult hereafter; it is a question, not whether we shall have civil war under certain contingencies, but whether we shall prevent it under any. It is idle, and worse than idle, to talk about Central Republics that can never be formed. We want neither Central Republics nor Northern Republics, but our own Republic and that of our fathers, destined one day to gather the whole continent under a flag that shall be the most august in the world. Having once known what it was to be members of a grand and peaceful constellation, we shall not believe, without further proof, that the laws of our gravitation are to be abolished, and we flung forth into chaos, a hurly-burly of jostling and splintering stars, whenever Robert Toombs or Robert Rhett, or any other Bob of the secession kite, may give a flirt of self-importance. The first and greatest benefit of government is that it keeps the peace, that it insures every man his right, and not only that but the permanence of it. In order to do this, its first requisite is stability; and this once firmly settled, the greater the extent of conterminous territory that can be subjected to one system and one language and inspired by one patriotism, the better.... Slavery is no longer the matter in debate, and we must beware of being led off upon that side-issue. The matter now in hand is the reëstablishment of order, the reaffirmation of national unity, and the settling once for all whether there can be such a thing as a government without the right to use its power in self-defence.” And he closes with the solemn words: “Peace is the greatest of blessings, when it is won and kept by manhood and wisdom; but it is a blessing that will not long be the housemate of cowardice. It is God alone who is powerful enough to let His authority slumber; it is only His laws that are strong enough to protect and avenge themselves. Every human government is bound to make its laws so far resemble His that they shall be uniform, certain, and unquestionable in their operations; and this it can do only by a timely show of power, and by an appeal to that authority which is of divine right, inasmuch as its office is to maintain that order which is the single attribute of that Infinite Reason which we can clearly apprehend and of which we have hourly example.”

The article headed “The Pickens-and-Stealins’ Rebellion,” which appeared in the _Atlantic_ for June, 1861, was the latest of the political articles contributed by Lowell to the magazine while he was editor, and appeared just as he surrendered his charge to Mr. Fields. It was written immediately after the attack on Fort Sumter and in the glow of that popular rising which swept away all the flimsy structure of the politicians and showed the might of that conviction which Lowell never doubted to lie in the minds of the American people. He longed then for a great leader. Major Anderson served for a brief hour to typify the spirit of uncompromising fidelity to duty, but Lowell was disappointed in Lincoln’s public utterances. He was impatient at the President’s caution, and especially at the temporizing policy which he pursued toward the Border States, and he traced the course of events before the first gun was fired on Sumter with the evident conviction that a firmer policy would have been surer to defeat the plans of the Confederacy; but the splendid assertion of the Union spirit fills him with an almost awed sense of joy. “We have no doubt of the issue,” he writes. “We believe that the strongest battalions are always on the side of God. The Southern army will be fighting for Jefferson Davis, or at most for the liberty of self-misgovernment, while we go forth for the defence of principles which alone make government august and civil society possible. It is the very life of the nation that is at stake. There is no question here of dynasties, races, religions, but simply whether we will consent to include in our Bill of Rights--not merely as of equal validity with all other rights, whether natural or acquired, but by its very nature transcending and abrogating them all--the Right of Anarchy. We must convince men that treason against the ballot-box is as dangerous as treason against a throne, and that, if they play so desperate a game, they must stake their lives on the hazard.... A ten years’ war would be cheap that gave us a country to be proud of, and a flag that should command the respect of the world because it was the symbol of the enthusiastic unity of a great nation.... We cannot think that the war we are entering on can end without some radical change in the system of African slavery. Whether it be doomed to a sudden extinction, or to a gradual abolition through economical causes, this war will not leave it where it was before. As a power in the state its reign is already over. The fiery tongue of the batteries in Charleston harbor accomplished in one day a conversion which the constancy of Garrison and the eloquence of Phillips had failed to bring about in thirty years. And whatever other result this war is destined to produce, it has already won for us a blessing worth everything to us as a nation in emancipating the public opinion of the North.” Thus in his last sentence he reiterates the judgment which he had over and over again pronounced in the whole series of these political papers, for he never lost sight of the fundamental fact that freedom resides in the spirit of man and is but recorded in his institutions.

Once more he wrote a prose paper for the _Atlantic_, moved by the attitude in England, for with others of his kind Lowell took grievously to heart the comments of the English press and the actions of the British government. In this paper, published December, 1861, entitled “Self-Possession _vs._ Prepossession,” he finds unmistakable symptoms of reaction in England, since 1848, against liberalism in politics, and tries the criticism of the United States government in which the press indulged by the action of England toward Ireland and India; and finally he points out the restrictions imposed on any constitutional government by the very conditions of its existence, forbidding it to act in advance of the convictions of its people. This he does to defend the administration against the charge that it is indifferent to the question of emancipation. He is impatient indeed of the extreme caution of Mr. Lincoln and his associates, but he is nevertheless of the opinion that the time has not yet come for turning the war into a crusade. It is interesting to mark how uppermost in Lowell’s mind is the cause of national unity. Time was when he drew near to the position taken by some of his anti-slavery associates that disunion was preferable to complicity with slavery; but as the conflict between the two opposing forces deepened, he took more and more steadily the larger view, and his democratic principles became bound up with the unity of the nation, and at last with the supremacy of law as represented by the national cause.

“Is this then,” he breaks out fervently at the close of his paper, “to be a commonplace war, a prosaic and peddling quarrel about cotton? Shall there be nothing to enlist enthusiasm or kindle fanaticism? Are we to have no cause like that for which our English republican ancestors died so gladly on the field, with such dignity on the scaffold?--no cause that shall give us a hero, who knows but a Cromwell? To our minds, though it may be obscure to Englishmen, who look on Lancashire as the centre of the universe, no army was ever enlisted for a nobler service than ours. Not only is it national life and a foremost place among nations that is at stake, but the vital principle of Law itself, the august foundation on which the very possibility of government, above all of self-government, rests as in the hollow of God’s own hand. If democracy shall prove itself capable of having raised twenty millions of people to a level of thought where they can appreciate this cardinal truth, and can believe no sacrifice too great for its defence and establishment, then democracy will have vindicated itself beyond all chance of future cavil. Here, we think, is a Cause the experience of whose vicissitudes and the grandeur of whose triumph will be able to give us heroes and statesmen. The Slave-Power must be humbled, must be punished,--so humbled and so punished as to be a warning forever; but slavery is an evil transient in its cause and its consequence, compared with those which would result from unsettling the faith of a nation in its own manhood, and setting a whole generation of men hopelessly adrift in the formless void of anarchy.”

The reserve with which he speaks of the President’s policy is the wise tone to be adopted in a printed article. In his private letters, where such caution is not needed, he gives expression openly to his impatience. In a letter written at the same time as this article, he says: “I confess that my opinion of the Government does not rise, to say the least. If we are saved it will be God’s doing, not man’s, and will He save those who are not worth saving? Lincoln may be right, for aught I know,--prudence is certainly a good drag upon virtue,--but I guess an ounce of Frémont is worth a pound of long Abraham. Mr. L. seems to have a theory of carrying on war without hurting the enemy. He is incapable, apparently, of understanding that they _ought_ to be hurt. The doing good to those that despitefully entreat us was not meant for enemies of the commonwealth. The devil’s angels are those that do his work, and for such there is a lake of fire and brimstone prepared. We have been undertaking to frighten the Devil with cold pitch.

“At the same time it looks as if the rebels must be losing more than we. They _must_ be poorly off for most things that go to make up the efficiency of an army, and if they can’t attack us what can they do? I am in a constant state of _un_pleasurable excitement. Jemmy[4] and Willy[5] are at Leesburg, in full sight of the enemy’s pickets, and I can’t bear to think of either of them being hurt. Mary was here last night, and though she puts a good face on it, there was something very painful to me in the hoarse hollowness of her voice. If they should die in battle well on into the enemy’s lines, it would be all that one could ask, but it would be dreadful to have them picked off by those murdering cowards. Let’s think of something else.”

A month later, and the boys he spoke of so affectionately and tremulously had fallen. In that most affecting of the second series of the “Biglow Papers,” “Mr. Hosea Biglow to the Editor of the _Atlantic Monthly_,” printed at the close of the war, he could refer to them in verse which holds all the passion of tears. Now, he can only send tidings to his most intimate friend in a few restrained words: “We have the worst news. Dear Willie is killed, and James badly wounded. They must have behaved like men. Think of poor Mary, whose husband is so ill that he cannot be told of it. She does not _know_ it yet, though she is prepared. But he will be brought home this afternoon. He was truly a noble young fellow. Simple, brave, and pure I knew him to be in a very rare measure. We have the pride of knowing that our men _must_ have done well. Of the officers of the 20th, two were drowned, and _all_ the rest (except Col. Lee) wounded. Willie was the only one killed. Wendell Holmes wounded. Last despatch says, ‘Lowell and Holmes doing well this morning,’--that’s to-day. Thank God for that, and that they all did their duty.” Two days later he added: “He came home yesterday afternoon, his face little changed, they tell me, and with a smile on it. He got his wound as we could wish. The adjutant of the regiment was hit, Willie sprang forward to help him, and was shot instantly. Jamie sprang to help him, and was hit, but will be about again in ten days or so.... It is some consolation to think that he was struck in so graceful an action, and his wound is in front, as I knew it would be.”

The depth of feeling which appears in his prose at this time, as he tries to set forth the essential character of the great conflict, could scarcely fail to find manifestation in poetry, since that was his native speech. Yet it required genuine possession of mind. In the years just preceding the actual breaking out of war Lowell could, as we have seen, treat with badinage such manifestations as the American Tract Society, and the speech-making of Choate and Cushing; he could, indeed, pass in these papers from satire to earnest examination of fundamentals; but somehow he could not bring himself to use the keener weapon which he had handled so skilfully in the discussion over Texas and the Mexican War. “Friendly people say to me sometimes,” he writes to Thomas Hughes, 13 September, 1859, “‘write us more “Biglow Papers,”’ and I have even been simple enough to try, only to find that I could not.” And a couple of months later R. G. White writes: “The _Atlantic_ has just come in, and I miss what you led me to expect from your friend B. O. F. Sawin.” He had plainly made a deliberate attempt, for in July of this year he was writing to Mr. Norton: “I have a new ‘Biglow’ running in my head, and I shall write it as soon as my brain clears off. At present I feel all the time like the next morning without having had the day before, which is too bad. I _think_ my new ‘Biglow’ will be funny. If not you will never see it. It will be on the reopening of the slave trade, and some rather humorous combinations have come into my mind. We shall see.”

It is not improbable that the impetus to verse came from the stirring of his personal emotions in the autumn of 1861, when he was following with anxious yet proud emotions the career of the two nephews whom he loved with that freedom which an uncle bestows on those who, not his own children, are yet his children’s nearest kin. It was on 20 September that he wrote of the “constant state of _un_pleasurable excitement” under which he labored. On 8 October he writes to Mr. Fields, who had been urging him to send a contribution to the _Atlantic_: “I set about a poem last night,--_apropos_ of the times,--and hope to finish it to-morrow, and if it turn out to be good for anything, I will send it at once, and you can print it or no as you like.”

This poem was “The Washers of the Shroud,” which appeared in the November _Atlantic_. The same thought prevails in this poem which found ampler expression in his prose, as we have seen, a conviction that his country was not to “join the waiting ghosts of names,” but was to have the

“larger manhood, saved for those That walk unblenching through the trial-fires.”[6]

How deeply he felt the poem may be seen not only in the solemn measure of the verse itself, but in the confession of physical exhaustion in which the writing of it left him.[7] Most impressive was the coincidence of the final stanza with the news which reached Elmwood just as the poem itself fell under the eye of the great public. “God, give us peace!” he had said in the penultimate stanza,--

“God, give us peace!--not such as lulls to sleep, But sword on thigh, and brow with purpose knit! And let our Ship of State to harbor sweep, Her ports all up, her battle-lanterns lit, And her leashed thunders gathering for their leap!”

And then,

“So cried I, with clenched hands and passionate pain, Thinking of dear ones by Potomac’s side: Again the loon laughed mocking, and again The echoes bayed far down the night and died, While waking I recalled my wandering brain.”[8]

There is a single sentence in a letter written four days before the fatal news came which helps to show that side of Lowell’s nature out of which his best work sprang, the attitude of receptivity to the large elemental life. Taken in connection with the sudden blow so soon to fall, it enables one to understand better the power by which Lowell was aroused to action: “These last rains have been _lifting_ the leaves (si levan le foglie) with a vengeance, making as clean work as ever Highland Cateran with cattle. I can’t understand people who call autumn a melancholy season unless they are cockneys indeed. To a country-bred fellow like me, the exquisite atmosphere and the dear associations with nutting and fishing and _trying_ to shoot ducks, and lying under warm hillsides, make it anything but sad. Even to see the leaves fall is a pleasure to me which few others match.”

Certain it is that from this time there seemed to be a new and, I think, loftier and more sustained spirit in his writing upon the great issues of the day. For one thing, he found vent in a rapid succession of poems which form the second series of the “Biglow Papers.” Early in December, 1861, he wrote the first, apparently under pressure to return to this form. “It was clean against my critical judgment,” he writes, “for I don’t believe in resuscitations--we hear no good of the _posthumous_ Lazarus--but I may get into the vein and do some good;” and it is clear that the effort did seat him again in the saddle, for he followed his first paper, which appeared in January, 1862, with five more in successive months, which were in effect pungent comments on the course of events in that dark period. He had apparently the stimulus of an engagement with Mr. Fields, the editor of the _Atlantic_, for we find him in August confessing his inability to bring to light another paper which was confined somewhere in his perplexed brain.

Lowell could not of course escape his own shadow cast by the brilliant success of the first series, although fourteen years in a man’s memory does not raise such an accumulation of fame as it does in the memory of spectators. He was doubtless a bit nervous as he essayed to repeat an earlier impromptu, for such the first series may fairly be called, but the nervousness really attacked only the beginning of his effort; once he was fairly under way, the old assurance all came back, and it was easy enough to indulge in that vernacular which was so imbedded in his early consciousness as to be not an acquisition but an inheritance. The Yankee dialect and macaronics, both of which were the lingo of his boyhood, were so native to his wit that he handled them in maturity as freely as one’s hand grasps in a return to the country the scythe which has been swung in boyhood.

It is perhaps more to the point to observe that, as in the earlier series, the figures of this pastoral had been developed from suddenly designed sketches until they stood full formed to the reader in the resultant book, now, upon the resumption of the art, they became simply accepted types to be illustrated rather than developed; and there is therefore from the start a firmness of touch and a solidity of modelling which give to the entire series an air of certainty and ease, as if the author had no need to add or rub out. There is possibly a little loss of buoyancy and spontaneity, but if so there is compensation in the touch of wisdom and especially of deep feeling characteristic of the series as a whole. Lowell is so sure of the rustic form he is using, and of the old-fashioned pedantry of Mr. Wilbur, that he can draw more confidently from deeper soundings, as indeed the very growth of his own nature compels him to do. Thus, while the satire of the earlier series is more amusing, that of the second is more biting. For when he was dealing with the iniquities of the Mexican war, he was after all contemplating what might be deemed a cutaneous disease as compared with the deadly virus now attacking the most vital part of the national body, and, moreover, fourteen years of personal experience such as he had known could scarcely fail to give him more penetration.

There are one or two surface indications of all this which may be noticed. Thus, though the Reverend Homer Wilbur of the second series is the same serene, absconding sort of parson as in the first, now and then Lowell forgets the impersonation and speaks in his own voice. This is especially observable in the second of the papers. What Mr. Wilbur says there respecting the English and their criticism of America can scarcely be distinguished in manner from Lowell’s own utterances in prose papers already referred to. And again, in the first number, written when Lowell was freshly grieving over the loss of his nephews, there is a trumpet note in the voice of Mr. Wilbur which is both the perfection of art and the sincerity of feeling. The parson is defending himself against the charge of inconsistency in allowing his youngest son to raise a company for the war. He refers with characteristic complacency to the example he himself had set by serving as a chaplain in the war of 1812, and adds: “It was, indeed, grievous to send my Benjamin, the child of my old age; but after the discomfiture of Manassas, I with my own hands did buckle on his armor, trusting in the great Comforter and Commander for strength according to my need. For truly the memory of a brave son dead in his shroud were a greater staff of my declining years than a living coward (if those may be said to have lived who carry all of themselves into the grave with them), though his days might be long in the land, and he should get much goods. It is not till our earthen vessels are broken that we find and truly possess the treasure that was laid up in them.”

It is possible that Lowell took a little alarm when he read over the prose introduction to his second paper, for thereafter there is a studied care to make Mr. Wilbur speak in his own measured tones, even to an indulgence in the introduction to the fifth paper in a piece of most elaborate nonsense mocking the antiquary’s enthusiasm. The manner, at last, in which Mr. Wilbur’s death is announced, the bringing upon the scenes for obituary purposes of his colleague the Reverend Jeduthun Hitchcock, who is deliciously discriminated from his senior yet shown to have been formed out of the same clay, the posthumous sayings from Mr. Wilbur’s Table Talk,--all this is conceived in a most sympathetic and genuine spirit of art. The delineation of old age, indeed, in this character was, one may guess, something more than artistic imagining. There is a bit of nonsense which Lowell wrote to Miss Norton in 1864, which for its full effect ought to be reproduced in facsimile, for he took the most elaborate pains to transform his hand into that of a poor trembling old nonagenarian: “Since I lost my last tooth, I am a great deal more comfortable, I thank you. The new sett maide for me Doctor Tucker’s great granson works well and I eat comfortable. Let me recommend Tinto’s hair dyes. It makes all black to be sure, and you look like your fotograms. My palsy hardly troubles me at all now. My memory is as good as it ever was, and my hand-writing as good as in my earliest years. I wrote a little poem last week which Fanny thinks as good as anything I ever did. It begins

Let dogs delight to bark and bite For ’tis _their_ nature, too.

But I don’t think she hears very well with her new trumpet.

“Certainly I will dine with you on Sunday and shall expect you on Thursday if Tuesday should be a fair day. The death of Holmes is an awful warning, but one can’t expect to be very strong at ninety nine. I remember his mother who died near fifty years ago.”

The fun we make often discloses the gravity that lies behind, as if we could exorcise a spirit by jesting at it, and Lowell was tormented, strange to say, by the apprehension of old age long before he approached it. There is, therefore, something pathetic as well as humorous in the fragment of Mr. Wilbur’s letter which introduces the “Latest Views of Mr. Biglow.” It is the imitation palsy again, and yet behind Mr. Wilbur’s tremulous phrases one reads those strong convictions which Lowell held to throughout the perplexing days before Gettysburg. “Though I believe Slavery,” Mr. Wilbur says, “to have been the cause of it [the war] by so thoroughly demoralizing Northern politicks for its own purposes as to give opportunity and hope to treason, yet I would not have our thought and purpose diverted from their true object,--the maintenance of the idea of Government. We are not merely suppressing an enormous riot, but contending for the possibility of permanent order coexisting with democratical fickleness; and while I would not superstitiously venerate form to the sacrifice of substance, neither would I forget that an adherence to precedent and prescription can alone give that continuity and coherence under a democratic constitution which are inherent in the person of a despotick monarch and the selfishness of an aristocratical class. _Stet pro ratione voluntas_ is as dangerous in a majority as in a tyrant.”

Distinct as are the judgments of Mr. Wilbur, it is after all in the poems from Hosea Biglow and his foil Birdofredom Sawin that we get the freest and most luminous expression of Lowell’s mind. He began the new series in a low key by recounting the experience of the renegade Yankee during the years since the Mexican war, but the affair of the Trent happened immediately after he had written the first paper, and before completing Birdofredom’s story he dashed off that quaint fable of the dialogue between the Bridge and the Monument, ending with the verses “Jonathan to John,” which was a genuine delivery of his mind. “If I am not mistaken,” he wrote to Mr. Fields on sending it, “it will _take_. ’Tis about Mason and Slidell, and I have ended it with a refrain that I hope has a kind of _tang_ to it.” The judgments which he passed in it were not momentary impulses. Three years later he wrote a letter[9] which repeats in prose much the same sentiments. It would be difficult to find a better exponent than Lowell of the temper of educated Americans toward England, a temper which discriminates sharply between the England of history and of personal affection and the England that registered in the nineteenth century the prejudices of a lingering bureaucratic régime.

In the third, fourth, and fifth papers Lowell used his satire effectively to sting his countrymen into a perception of the meaner side of politics, for his incessant cry throughout his political career was for independence and idealism, and the obverse was an unfailing denunciation of shams and cowardly truckling to popular views. It was when he came to the close of the six numbers which he appears to have agreed to write that he gave himself up to the luxury of that bobolink song which always swelled in his throat when spring melted into summer. “Sunthin’ in the Pastoral Line,” like the opening notes of “The Vision of Sir Launfal,” like “Under the Willows,” “Al Fresco,” and similar poems, is the insistent call of Nature which is perhaps the most unmistakable witness in Lowell of a voice most his own because least subject to his own volition. To be sure, Lowell had a truth he wished to press,--the need of crushing the rattlesnake in its head of slavery; but he must needs first clear his throat by a long sweet draught of nature, and the mingling of pure delight in out of doors with the perplexities of the hour renders this number of the “Biglow Papers” one that goes very straight to the reader’s heart.

There is no flagging in this monthly succession, as one reads the “Papers” now, but Lowell hated the compulsory business of a poem a month,--as he says in this latest number:--

“I thought ef this ’ere milkin’ o’ the wits So much a month, war n’t givin’ Natur’ fits,-- Ef folks war n’t druv, findin’ their own milk fail, To work the cow that hez an iron tail, An’ ef idees ’thout ripenin’ in the pan Would send up cream to humor ary man.”

And he wrote to Fields, 5 June, 1862: “It’s no use. I reverse the gospel difficulty, and while the flesh is willing enough, the spirit is weak. My brain must lie fallow a spell,--there is no super-phosphate for those worn-out fields. Better no crop than small potatoes. I want to have the _passion_ of the thing on me again and beget lusty Biglows. I am all the more dejected because you have treated me so well. But I must rest awhile. My brain is out of kilter.” And again in August he wrote to the same: “Give me a victory and I will give you a poem: but I am now clear down in the bottom of the well, where I see the Truth too near to make verses of.”

So it was six months before he wrote again, this time the “Latest Views of Mr. Biglow.” He carried out his plan, after this interval, of putting an end to Mr. Wilbur. The verses repeat his impatience for some action, some great leader, but at the close he bursts forth into exultation over Lincoln’s proclamation of emancipation. And then, for two years and more, Hosea keeps silence.

Yet if victory did not arouse him, the greater theme of sacrifice called out one of his most solemn and stirring odes, that dedicated to the memory of Robert Gould Shaw, and entitled “Memoriæ Positum R. G. Shaw.” It may well be read in connection with the other poem suggested by the events of the war in 1863, “Two Scenes from the Life of Blondel.” There is in this parable a half confession of failure, a reflection upon ideals once held gallantly and then trailed in the dust of disappointment. He seems to have written the first scene, in which Lincoln is the ideal captain, without at first designing the second, for he writes to Mr. Fields, who already had the first: “I have written a Palinode to ‘Blondel,’ and so made two poems of it. The latter half is half-humorous and, I think, will help the effect. You see how dangerous it is to pay a poet handsomely beforehand. I don’t know where I shall stop. I shall be sending an epic presently.... I should like your notion of the second part of Blondel, which (in the first relief of incubation) I am inclined to think clever. But there was nothing wiser than Horace’s ninth year--only it overwhelms us like a ninth wave (that’s Wendell’s, _tenth_ the Latins said, but I wanted nine), and if we kept our verses so long we should print none of them. A strong argument for monthly magazines, you see.” There is so little of the essentially dramatic about Lowell’s poetry that it is not unfair to hear his voice only slightly changed in such a poem as this. But all such speculative and half-moody expressions gave way before the dignity of Shaw’s death. “I would rather have my name known and blest, as his will be,” Lowell writes to Colonel Shaw’s mother, “through all the hovels of an outcast race, than blaring from all the trumpets of repute.” And the ultimate judgment which he held, despite the confusion wrought by all the meaner passions of the time which vext his soul, rings out clearly in the final lines:--

“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 couldst dare And die as thine have done!”[10]

For the one note, in the discord of the war, heard more and more clearly by Lowell, was that of triumph for democracy as incarnate in his country. No one can read his writings from this time forward without observing how deep a passion this love of his country was. In earlier life he had had a passion for Freedom, and the Freedom which was to him as the Lady to her knight, was very comprehensive and took many forms. Now, in his maturity, and when he saw the one great blot fading from the escutcheon, there was a steady concentration of passion upon that incorporation of freedom in the fair land which seemed to his imagination to have gotten her soul, and no longer Earth’s biggest country, but to have

“risen up Earth’s greatest nation.”

“The Biglow Papers” had appeared in the _Atlantic_. There also had been printed his “Blondel” and “Memoriæ Positum R. G. Shaw;” but since the article in December, 1861, “Self-Possession _vs._ Prepossession,” and another in January, 1863,[11] he had not made that magazine the vehicle for prose articles on public affairs, as had been his practice during his editorship of it. Now, at the close of 1863, he entered upon an engagement which was to give him a new medium for communication, and one which he used effectively for the next ten years. The _North American Review_, which had been founded by a number of cultivated gentlemen in Boston in 1815, was modelled on the famous quarterlies of Great Britain, and had for fifty years been the leading representative in America of dignified scholarship and literature. At times it had been spirited and aggressive, but for the most part it had stood rather for elegant leisure and a somewhat remote criticism. For the last ten years it had been conducted in a temperate and careful way by the Rev. Dr. Andrew P. Peabody, who held by the old traditions. But its fortunes were at a low ebb, it no longer was a power, and the publishers, hoping to reinstate it in authority, applied to Lowell to take charge of it. He saw the opportunity it would give him, and he accepted the offer, but only on condition that Mr. Norton should be associated with him as active editor. The advertisement put forth by the publishers was such as to quiet the minds of any who might be uneasy over a change of conduct; for, after naming the now editors, it characterized them as “gentlemen who, for sound and elegant scholarship, have achieved an enviable reputation, both in this country and in Europe; and whose taste, education, and experience eminently qualify them for the position they have assumed. Of the former it may be said that his essays in the periodical which, under his editorship, reached the summit of its fame, surpassed in vigor and force those of any contributor; of the latter, that he has ‘added new honors to the name he bears by the extent and variety of his knowledge, and by the force and elegance which he has exhibited both as a writer and a speaker.’ And of both, that their thorough loyalty to the liberal institutions of our country, and their sympathy with the progressive element of the times, renders them peculiarly fitted to conduct the _Review_, which has by competent authority been pronounced ‘the leading literary organ of the country,’ and of which it has been said ‘it has not its equal in America, nor its superior in the world.’” The advertisement continued in measured phrases to announce the policy of the review, and it would have been difficult for its old subscribers to detect any promise of change, though as a matter of fact, while the term scholarly could equally well be applied to it in the next ten years, the scholarship was more exact, the scope of the review was greatly widened, and for pungency and thoroughness of criticism, for good English and for breadth of view, it was so strikingly marked, that it became a signal example of how a magazine may at once be lifted to a higher level without being compelled to turn a somersault.

The advertisement, however, which Crosby & Nichols put forth no doubt with a dignified elation, excited Lowell’s ire, and he gave vent to his annoyance in a rhymed letter to his colleague:--

“DEAR CHARLES,--

I am mad as a piper And could bite those old files like a viper, Reading their d--d advertisement For donkeys, and not for the wise, meant, (Which undoubtedly tickles Messrs. Crosby and Nichols To the innermost jecur Or brain--where they’re weaker!) I feel as if the rogues meant to work us Like the clowns of a travelling circus, Blowing their trumpets before us In a brazen and asinine chorus, Sending advance troops of blackguards To blear all the fences with placards,-- ‘This is the famous Dan Rice, sirs, Whose jokes are beyond any price, sirs, And this is that eminent man Joe Grimes, so sublime on the banjo, And especially great in the prances Of the best Ethiopian dances!’ Why, I feel my shamed visage o’erdarkle With my last evening’s waterproof charcoal! Dear Charles, all your articles toss by And see Messrs. Nichols and Crosby: Curl up your moustache like a bandit And tell ’em we never will stand it To be treated (I put here one _more_ curse) Like a couple of literate porkers (Nay, a literate one would much rather Be made into pork like his father.) I’d go, but must hurry to college To help the confusion of knowledge, So remain Your true friend, as you know well, !!!!‘The world famous James Russell Lowell Shuperior every way vastly To the late justly-favorite Astley!!!!’”

Though Mr. Norton took the laboring oar in editing, Lowell put in his stroke now and then, as may be seen in a letter to Mr. Motley asking for a contribution.[12] In that he sets forth the situation in a few sentences: “You have heard,” he says, “that Norton and I have undertaken to edit the _North American_,--a rather Sisyphian job, you will say. It wanted three chief elements to be successful. It wasn’t thoroughly, that is, thickly and thinly, loyal, it wasn’t lively, and it had no particular opinions on any particular subject. It was an eminently safe periodical, and accordingly was in great danger of running aground. It was an easy matter, of course, to make it loyal,--even to give it opinions (such as they were), but to make it alive is more difficult. Perhaps the day of the quarterlies is gone by, and those megatheria of letters may be in the mere course of nature withdrawing to their last swamps to die in peace. Anyhow, here we are with our megatherium on our hands, and we must strive to find what will fill his huge belly, and keep him alive a little longer.”

That this and similar letters were not so much evidence of Lowell’s energetic assumption of editorial tasks as special efforts coaxed out of him by his associate, may be inferred from a letter to Mr. Norton written three days later, in which he begins: “It is abominable that you should have been gone a whole month without a letter from me,--and yet so wholly in accordance with natural laws that you must be pleased when I explain the reason of my silence. That I have thought of you I need not say. Well, do you understand the nature of a cask, and accordingly the analogous human nature of a ‘vessel of wrath?’ A cask has a bung which is kept tight, and a spigot through which it delights to unbosom itself into the can for refreshment or mirth. But this is not all. It may be never so small,--a needle might stop it,--but _if_ stopped, not a drop shall you coax out of the faucet for love or money. Now when I read your letter, walking in the hot sun along the side of the graveyard, I was full of good liquor reaming ripe to flow for you. But you bound me by a vow to write to Motley ere I wrote to you, and in so doing hermetically sealed the vent, and locked up all my vintage in myself. I could have written to _you_, but Motley was another thing. And first came Commencement, then Phi Beta, then the making of my salt hay, and at last I got it done and a letter also to Howells.”

But if Lowell shirked the drudgery of editing he gave what was much more worth while to the _Review_ in his frequent contributions. During the remainder of the war, and during the early stages of the reconstruction period, he had in nearly every number a political article. The new editors issued their first number in January, 1864, and Lowell took for his subject “The President’s Policy.” The last direct public expression he had given of his estimate of Mr. Lincoln was in his _Atlantic_ article in December, 1861. Two years had passed since that time and the question was now looming up of the election of Mr. Lincoln’s successor. The election was to be held in November, 1864, and the four articles which Lowell wrote in the quarterly numbers of that year are all practically arguments for the reëlection of Mr. Lincoln. The January article, combined (with some confusion of tenses) with what he wrote after the President’s death, now appears under the title “Abraham Lincoln,” in “Political Essays.” The estimate of the President, made for the most part when Lincoln was under fire, not only from his political opponents, but from those who might be expected to support him, is a clear appreciation of those great qualities of patience and balance of mind which have come to be recognized as the source of his strength. Lowell, as we have seen, had not at the outset refrained from a critical attitude toward Lincoln. Now he confesses his own blunder and throws the confession into the scales when weighing him. “Mr. Lincoln, as it seems to us in reviewing his career, though we have sometimes in our impatience thought otherwise, has always waited, as a wise man should, till the right moment brought up all his reserves;” and he reads well a prime element of Lincoln’s power when he makes distinction between the conscientiously rigid _doctrinaire_ and the statesman who achieves his triumph by quietly accomplishing his ends. “Mr. Lincoln’s perilous task has been to carry a rather shaky raft through the rapids, making fast the unrulier logs as he could snatch opportunity, and the country is to be congratulated that he did not think it his duty to run straight at all hazards, but cautiously to assure himself with his setting pole where the main current was, and keep steadily to that. He is still in wild water, but we have faith that his skill and sureness of eye will bring him out right at last.” What especially bound Lincoln’s policy to Lowell’s confidence was the fact that its pole-star was national integrity, and in tracing as he does the slow process by which the President carried the nation with him till the abolition of slavery became no longer the cry of a party but the logical necessity of a nation, he practically unfolds the process of his own development.[13]

In the April number of the _North American_ Lowell took for his text General McClellan’s Report, and applied his powers of analysis to this for the purpose of constructing the figure of Lincoln’s opponent. McClellan was no longer in the field, but he was the military critic of the administration and the man about whom the forces in opposition were gradually collecting, since he seemed to have been thrown up for this purpose by the elements which were most active. McClellan’s report, which had recently appeared, covered the period from July, 1861, to November, 1862, a period which in the rapid progress of events was already historical and could be examined in the light of later movements. To McClellan, however, the Report was an _apologia pro vita sua_, and nothing had happened since it was written, so essentially was he a critic rather than a creator. Lowell was quick to see the weakness of McClellan’s position in defending himself, preliminary to assuming a position where he was to defend the country, and in making his defence issue in charges against the authority under whose orders he had acted. He saw not so much the politician under the soldier’s cloak as a man of such calibre as fitted him to become the tool of politicians, and so self-conscious that once he is possessed of the notion of his political importance he looks at everything from a personal point of view. The Report gave abundant evidence of this, and Lowell follows him through the narrative, not as a military critic but as a student of human nature, and in his summary asks the very pertinent question if a man of this make-up is a man to put at the head of affairs. “Though we think,” he says, “great injustice has been done by the public to General McClellan’s really high merit as an officer, yet it seems to us that those very merits show precisely the character of intellect to unfit him for the task just now demanded of a statesman. His capacity for organization may be conspicuous; but be it what it may, it is one thing to bring order out of the confusion of mere inexperience, and quite another to retrieve it from a chaos of elements mutually hostile, which is the problem sure to present itself to the next administration. This will constantly require precisely that judgment on the nail, and not to be drawn for at three days’ sight, of which General McClellan has shown least. Is our path to be so smooth for the next four years that a man whose leading characteristic is an exaggeration of difficulties is likely to be our surest guide?... The man who is fit for the office of President in these times should be one who knows how to advance, an art which General McClellan has never learned.”

In the July number Lowell recurs more distinctly to the fundamental questions involved in the war, since his task is to place in comparison two historical works issuing from opposite sides, Pollard’s initial volume of “The Southern History of the War,” devoted to the first year, and the first volume of Greeley’s treatise, “The American Conflict.” As these two, and more especially the latter, naturally set about accounting for the war, Lowell makes them the text for his article, “The Rebellion: its Causes and Consequences.” The breadth of the theme tempts him into an introductory discussion of the several modes of writing history, and an inquiry into the spirit in which history in the making should be interpreted, but his real business, when he gets at it, is to examine the political character of the nation at the breaking out of the war, and to trace the insidious influence of slavery on national politics. He repeats in newer and more forcible phrases the contention, so often made by him, that the corruption of government had been going on steadily under this subtle solvent, and that the hope of the nation was in the extinction of so disturbing an element. He applies the truth to the political situation in the approaching election, and warns the South that “there is no party at the North, considerable in numbers or influence, which could come into power on the platform of making peace with the Rebels on their own terms. No party can get possession of the government which is not in sympathy with the temper of the people, and the people, forced into war against their will by the unprovoked attack of pro-slavery bigotry, are resolved on pushing it to its legitimate conclusion. War means now, consciously with many, unconsciously with most, but inevitably, abolition.... If the war be waged manfully, as becomes a thoughtful people, without insult or childish triumph in success, if we meet opinion with wiser opinion, waste no time in badgering prejudice till it becomes hostility, and attack slavery as a crime against the nation, and not as individual sin, it will end, we believe, in making us the most powerful and prosperous community the world ever saw.”

Though he wrote hopefully in his public articles, Lowell’s letters show alternations of hope and discouragement, and intimate how much the war disturbed his peace of mind. He wrote to Mr. Norton, midway between the July and October numbers: “I shall say nothing about politics, my dear Charles, for I feel rather down in the mouth, and moreover I have not had an idea so long that I should not know one if I saw it. The war and its constant expectation and anxiety oppress me. I cannot think. If I had enough to leave behind me, I could enlist this very day and get knocked in the head. I hear bad things about Mr. Lincoln and try not to believe them.”

In July the two candidates for the presidency had not been formally named, but when Lowell came to prepare his article for the October number, which would appear on the eve of the election, the contest was at its height, though events were rapidly throwing their votes against the losing party. Lowell makes capital use of this fact in his article “McClellan or Lincoln?” which gains in wit through the evident elation which possesses the writer over the almost certain results. He had written Motley at the end of July: “My own feeling has always been confident, and it is now hopeful. If Mr. Lincoln is re-chosen, I think the war will soon be over.... So far as I can see, the opposition to Mr. Lincoln is both selfish and factious, but it is much in favor of the right side that the Democratic party have literally not so much as a single plank of principle to float on, and the sea runs high. They don’t know what they are in favor of--hardly what they think it safe to be against. And I doubt if they gain much by going into an election on negatives.” By a series of eliminations, he leaves, in his article, the single point of difference between the policy of Lincoln and that which McClellan, according to his own showing, would pursue, namely, the policy of conciliation concerning which McClellan made loud protestations; and then he proceeds to riddle that assumption. The article, however, is interesting chiefly for another summary of Lowell’s judgment of Lincoln:--

“Mr. Lincoln, in our judgment, has shown from the first the considerate wisdom of a practical statesman. If he has been sometimes slow in making up his mind, it has saved him the necessity of being hasty to change it when once made up, and he has waited till the gradual movement of the popular sentiment should help him to his conclusions and sustain him in them. To be moderate and unimpassioned in revolutionary times that kindle natures of a more flimsy texture, may not be a romantic quality, but it is a rare one, and goes with those massive understandings on which a solid structure of achievement may be reared. Mr. Lincoln is a long-headed and long-purposed man, who knows when he is ready,--a secret General McClellan never learned.... We have seen no reason to change our opinion of Mr. Lincoln since his wary scrupulousness won him the applause of one party, or his decided action, when he was at last convinced of its necessity, made him the momentary idol of the other. We will not call him a great man, for over-hasty praise is too apt to sour at last into satire, and greatness may be trusted safely to history and the future; but an honest one we believe him to be, and with no aim save to repair the glory and the greatness of his country.”

The reëlection of Lincoln with a convincing majority, and the rapid crushing of the shell of the Confederacy, conspired at once to give Lowell a spirit of exultation, tempered with profound regret, and a keen interest in the results of the war. The one mood appears in the striking paper on “Reconstruction” which he contributed to the _North American_ for April, 1865, the other in the new “Biglow Paper” which he contributed to the _Atlantic_ for the same month. The latter was written earlier and apparently was drawn out of him by the golden persuasion of Mr. Fields, for we find Lowell writing him 2 February, 1865, when he sends him No. X. of the “Biglow Papers,” “Mr. Hosea Biglow to the Editor of the Atlantic Monthly:”

“You pulled the string of this cold shower-bath, so you can’t complain. But if you don’t like it, I am willing to take back my machine. If on the other hand you _do_,--and if you don’t, by Jove, count on my undying hate,--why, suppose you send me the canvas--greenback, I mean, _before_ you print it. This would give us both a sensation which is desirable in a world where an Emperor offered a kingdom for a new one. Remember in future that asking poets for verses is almost as fatal as asking them to read them. ‘Thyself art the cause of this anguish.’ _Item._ I have been mulling over a fairy story, of which something may come and something may not.[14] I begin to suspect the egg _may_ be chalk. I have heard of such things. Even the muses in this degenerate age have learned to sophisticate. The devil tempts me to tell you I have also a novel in progress, and an epic poem and a tragedy--also a satire in which those who don’t like the foregoing are ground to powder. But I have scared you enough for once, and I really haven’t begun one of ’em, unless it may be the tragedy which one goes on composing all his life.”

The ground-swell of emotion which stirs the verses written in that winter of 1865, just before spring came, and when the buds of peace were already beginning to open, is expressive of that strong personal feeling which entered into Lowell’s measure of the sacrifice which had been made when he reckoned on the great gain that was to accrue to the nation. Poetry, and especially that cast in a homely mould, was his vent for this feeling. He rarely showed emotion in his prose, but in the article which he wrote a few weeks later when the end was just in sight, he discloses in another way, and almost as strongly, the depth of his nature, for in this article on “Reconstruction” there is scarcely any of that play of wit which marks his earlier political papers.

“Come, while our country feels the lift Of a gret instinct shoutin’ ‘Forwards!’”

Hosea Biglow had just sung with tearful eyes and firm set lips, and Lowell’s whole nature seemed to rise in an eager desire to grapple with the great problem which was to confront the nation as soon as the last gun had been fired. The quiet, stately opening of the subject as he recounts with deep pride the attitude of the country, and the splendid attestation it had given of the staying power of democracy, is followed by a close examination of the main lines of policy to be followed in the reconstruction of the insurgent states. “We did not enter,” he says, “upon war to open a new market, or fresh fields for speculators, or an outlet for redundant population, but to save the experiment of democracy from destruction, and put it in a fairer way of success by removing the single disturbing element. Our business now is not to allow ourselves to be turned aside from a purpose which our experience thus far has demonstrated to have been as wise as it was necessary, and to see to it that, whatever be the other conditions of reconstruction, democracy, which is our real strength, receive no detriment.”

Hence, after some wise words regarding the treatment of the governing class at the South, and a penetrating exposition of the relation between these and the non-slaveholding class, he applies himself most closely to a study of the situation as regards the blacks, with the conclusion that the prime necessity is to make them land-holders and to give them the ballot. There are some sentences which have a mournful sound read to-day, thirty-five years after the discussion. “We believe the white race, by their intellectual and traditional superiority, will retain sufficient ascendancy to prevent any serious mischief from the new order of things.” “As to any prejudices which should prevent the two races from living together, it would soon yield to interest and necessity.” He is aware of the difficulties which beset the subject, but he contends that the large way is the only way. “If we are to try the experiment of democracy fairly, it must be tried in its fullest extent, and not halfway.... The opinion of the North is made up on the subject of emancipation, and Mr. Lincoln has announced it as the one essential preliminary to the readmission of the insurgent States. To our mind, citizenship is the necessary consequence, as it is the only effectual warranty, of freedom; and accordingly we are in favor of distinctly settling beforehand some conditional right of admission to it. We have purposely avoided any discussion on gradualism as an element in emancipation, because we consider its evil results to have been demonstrated in the British West Indies. True conservative policy is not an anodyne hiding away our evil from us in a brief forgetfulness. It looks to the long future of a nation, and dares the heroic remedy where it is scientifically sure of the nature of the disease.”

Then came the triumphant close in the surrender of Lee, and he writes to Mr. Norton: “The news, my dear Charles, is from Heaven. I felt a strange and tender exaltation. I wanted to laugh and I wanted to cry, and ended by holding my peace and feeling devoutly thankful. There is something magnificent in having a country to love. It is almost like what one feels for a woman. Not so tender, perhaps, but to the full as self-forgetful. I worry a little about reconstruction, but am inclined to think that matters will very much settle themselves.” He closed his political articles of the war period with one in July, entitled “Scotch the Snake, or kill it?” which is in a lighter vein than “Reconstruction,” and is in its way a quick survey of the underlying character of the great contest, suggested by an examination of that scrapbook of the war, Frank Moore’s _The Rebellion Record_. This mirror gives so many varied reflections that Lowell writes a little at random, making felicitous comments, but coming back, as so often before, to the paramount question of slavery and the treatment of the negro. As the title of his article intimates, he contends for a radical solution of the problem. “The more thought we bestow on the matter, the more thoroughly are we persuaded that the only way to get rid of the negro is to do him justice. Democracy is safe because it is just, and safe only when it is just to all. Here is no question of white or black, but simply of man. We have hitherto been strong in proportion as we dared be true to the sublime thought of our own Declaration of Independence, which for the first time proposed to embody Christianity in human laws, and announced the discovery that the security of the state is based on the moral instinct and the manhood of its members.”

The character, of the work he was noticing led him at the beginning of his paper into some reflections on the part played by newspapers in modern times, and the stimulus given to national sensitiveness by the quick transmission of news. “It is no trifling matter,” he says, “that thirty millions of men should be thinking the same thought and feeling the same pang at a single moment of time, and that these vast parallels of latitude should become a neighborhood more intimate than many a country village. The dream of Human Brotherhood seems to be coming true at last. The peasant who dipped his net in the Danube, or trapped the beaver on its banks, perhaps never heard of Cæsar, or of Cæsar’s murder; but the shot that shattered the forecasting brain, and curdled the warm, sweet heart of the most American of Americans, echoed along the wires through the length and breadth of a continent, swelling all eyes at once with tears of indignant sorrow. Here was a tragedy fulfilling the demands of Aristotle, and purifying with an instantaneous throb of pity and terror a theatre of such proportions as the world never saw. We doubt if history ever recorded an event so touching and awful as this sympathy, so wholly emancipated from the toils of space and time that it might seem as if earth were really sentient, as some have dreamed, or the great god Pan alive again to make the hearts of nations stand still with his shout. What is Beethoven’s ‘Funeral March for the Death of a Hero’ to the symphony of love, pity, and wrathful resolve which the telegraph of that April morning played on the pulses of a nation?”

It was perhaps with one of these phrases lingering in his mind that he characterized Lincoln a few weeks later when he came to write his Ode recited at the Harvard Commemoration. This commemoration was held by Harvard College, 21 July, 1865, in honor of its sons who had died in the war. Lowell was asked to write a poem for the occasion, and he has given in a letter written a score of years later, to Mr. Gilder, a bit of reminiscence respecting its composition. “The ode itself,” he says, “was an improvisation. Two days before the commemoration I had told my friend Child that it was impossible--that I was dull as a door-mat. But the next day something gave me a jog, and the whole thing came out of me with a rush. I sat up all night writing it out clear, and took it on the morning of the day to Child. ‘I have something but don’t yet know what it is, or whether it will do. Look at it and tell me.’ He went a little way apart with it under an elm-tree in the College yard. He read a passage here and there, brought it back to me, and said ‘Do? I should think so! Don’t you be scared!’ And I wasn’t, but virtue enough had gone out of me to make me weak for a fortnight after.” Something of this reaction appears in a letter to Miss Norton, written four days after the delivery of the poem: “I eat and smoke and sleep and go through all the nobler functions of a man mechanically still, and wonder at myself as at something outside of and alien to me. For have I not worked myself lean on an ‘Ode for Commemoration?’ Was I not so rapt with the fervor of conception as I have not been these ten years, losing my sleep, my appetite, and my flesh, those attributes to which I before alluded as nobly uniting us in a common nature with our kind? Did I not for two days exasperate everybody that came near me by reciting passages in order to try them on? Did I not even fall backward and downward to the old folly of hopeful youth, and think I had written something _really_ good at last? And am I not now enduring those retributive dumps which ever follow such sinful exaltations, the Erynnyes of Vanity? Did not I make John Holmes and William Story shed tears by my recitation of it (my ode) in the morning, both of ’em fervently declaring it was ‘noble’? Did not even the silent Rowse declare ’twas in a higher mood than much or most of later verse? Did not I think, in my nervous exhilaration, that ’twould be _the_ feature (as reporters call it) of the day? And, after all, have I not a line in the _Daily Advertiser_ calling it a ‘graceful poem’ (or ‘some graceful verses’ I forget which), which ‘was received with applause?’ Why, Jane, my legs are those of grasshoppers, and my head is an autumn threshing-floor, still beating with the alternate flails of strophe and antistrophe, and an infinite virtue is gone out of me somehow--but it seems _not_ into my verse as I dreamed. Well, well, Charles will like it--but then he always does, so what’s the use? I am Icarus now,

with the cold, salt sea over him instead of the warm exulting blue of ether. I am gone under, and I never will be a fool again.... Like a boy, I mistook my excitement for inspiration, and here I am in the mud. You see, also, I am a little disappointed and a little few (un petit peu) vexed. I did _not_ make the hit I expected, and am ashamed at having been again tempted into thinking I could write _poetry_, a delusion from which I have been tolerably free these dozen years.”[15]

There was one other comment made by Lowell on the ode which confirms these impressions and adds a little to the record of his experience in writing it. It occurs in a letter to J. B. Thayer, 8 December, 1868, upon the occasion of a review by Mr. Thayer of the volume of verse just published in which the ode was included: “I am not sure if I understand what you say about the tenth strophe. You will observe that it leads naturally to the eleventh, and that I there justify a certain narrowness in it as an expression of the popular feeling as well as my own. I confess I have never got over the feeling of wrath with which (just after the death of my nephew Willie) I read in an English paper that nothing was to be hoped of an army officered by tailors’ apprentices and butcher boys. The poem was written with a vehement speed, which I thought I had lost in the skirts of my professor’s gown. Till within two days of the celebration I was hopelessly dumb, and then it all came with a rush, literally making me lean (mi fece magro), and so nervous that I was weeks in getting over it. I was longer in getting the new (eleventh) strophe to my mind than in writing the rest of my poem. In _that_ I hardly changed a word, and it was so undeliberate that I did not find out till after it was printed that some of the verses lacked corresponding rhymes.[1]... I had put the ethical and political view so often in prose that I was weary of it. The motives of the war? I had impatiently urged them again and again,--but for an ode they must be in the blood and not the memory. One of my great defects (I have always been conscious of it) is an impatience of mind which makes me contemptuously indifferent about arguing matters that have once become convictions.”

Once more, in writing to the same correspondent in 1877, with regard to the versification, he says: “My problem was to contrive a measure which should not be tedious by uniformity, which should vary with varying moods, in which the transitions (including those of the voice) should be managed without jar. I at first thought of mixed rhymed and blank verses of unequal measures, like those in the choruses of ‘Samson Agonistes,’ which are in the main masterly. Of course Milton _deliberately_ departed from that stricter form of the Greek Chorus to which it was bound as much (I suspect) by the law of its musical accompaniment as by any sense of symmetry. I wrote some stanzas of the ‘Commemoration Ode’ on this theory at first, leaving some verses without a rhyme to match. But my ear was better pleased with the rhyme, coming at a longer interval, as a far-off echo, rather than instant reverberation, produced the same effect almost, and yet was grateful by unexpectedly recalling an association and faint reminiscence of consonance.”[17]

The ode did at once assert its high character, yet it must be borne in mind that the very reason of its form acted somewhat against its immediate popularity. It is truly an ode to be recited, and as a chorus depends for its power upon a volume of sound, so this ode needs, to bring out its full value, a great delivery. Lowell himself, always a sympathetic reader, had no such power of recitation as would at once convey to his audience a notion of the stateliness and procession of words which attaches to the ode. The impression of the hour was produced by the spontaneous outpouring of the heart of Phillips Brooks in prayer. “That,” says President Eliot, “was the most impressive utterance of a proud and happy day. Even Lowell’s Commemoration Ode did not at the moment so touch the hearts of his hearers; that one spontaneous and intimate expression of Brooks’s noble spirit convinced all Harvard men that a young prophet had risen up in Israel.”[18]

Lowell’s explanation of the form of the ode is significant. So native to him was the most genuine literary spirit that he could conceive of the ode and its delivery as one consistent whole without being perturbed by the consideration that he was to deliver it and to a modern audience trained in the reading of poetry, not in the hearing of it. Both the poetic reciter and the recipients were wanting, and the ode remains, a noble piece of declamation indeed for whoever has the great gift of poetic declamation, yet after all as surely to be read and not spoken as Browning’s dramas are to be read and not acted. It is this fine literary sense, penetrating even to a supposititious occasion, which clings to the ode and makes it so far caviare to the general. Yet it would be false indeed to regard such a statement as final. The fire which burned in Lowell’s members, leaving him cold afterward, glows in the great lines, and certain it is that at no other single poem, unless it be Whitman’s “My Captain,” does the young American of the generation born since the war so kindle his patriotic emotions.

The sixth stanza was not recited, but was written immediately afterward. It is so completely imbedded in the structure of the ode that it is difficult to think of it as an afterthought. It is easy to perceive that while the glow of composition and of recitation was still upon him Lowell suddenly conceived this splendid illustration and indeed climax of the utterance of the Ideal which is so impressive in the fifth stanza. So free, so spontaneous is this characterization of Lincoln, and so concrete in thought, that it has been most frequently read, we suspect, of any single portion of the ode, and it is so eloquent that one likes to fancy the whole force of the ode behind it, as if Lowell needed the fire he had fanned to white heat, for the very purpose of forging this last, firm tempered bit of steel.

Into these threescore lines Lowell has poured a conception of Lincoln which may justly be said to be to-day the accepted idea which Americans hold of their great President. It was the final expression of the judgment which had slowly been forming in Lowell’s own mind, and when he summed him up in his last line,--

“New birth of our new soul, the first American,”

he was honestly throwing away all the doubts which had from time to time beset him, and letting his ardent pursuit of the ideal, his profound faith in democracy as incarnate in his country, centre in this one man.

In April, 1887, the _Century Magazine_ had a brief article headed “Lincoln and Lowell,” in which the editor, quoting the pregnant sentence on Lincoln from Lowell’s recently published address on “Democracy,” is reminded that Lowell “was the first of the leading American writers to see clearly and fully, and clearly and fully and enthusiastically proclaim the greatness of Abraham Lincoln.” And after quoting this sixth stanza of the ode, he goes back and recalls the political papers in the _Atlantic_ and _North American Review_, with their references to Lincoln which we have already noted. The next number of the _Century_ contained an article in the nature of a postscript, citing the early judgment of Emerson also on the President. In publishing Nicolay and Hay’s “Life of Lincoln” in the magazine, the editor naturally was interested to recover the impression made by Lincoln when he was comparatively an untried man, on the poets and seers, who have a clearer divination than politicians. He was in correspondence with Lowell and wished if he could to learn what Longfellow and Whittier had then said.

Lowell replied under date of 7 February, 1887: “I can recollect nothing about Lincoln by either L. or W., though this would prove nothing. I _do_ remember a debate with Dr. Holmes just after Lincoln’s nomination. It was under the elms in front of the old Holmes house (where he took a photograph of me by O. W. H. and Sun), and he was much exercised in mind because Seward had not been the man. I, who had read Lincoln’s speeches, was entirely content.” The extracts which I have given from Lowell’s letters and essays make it, however, quite clear that the full recognition of Lincoln’s greatness was a growth and not an immediate insight. Nor is this strange. Lowell never saw Lincoln. Had he met him early in his career, and enjoyed the advantage which comes from personal sight, as Hawthorne for example did, there is little doubt that he would have borne away from the interview the impression which was stamped on so many ingenuous minds, and he would have read the President’s utterances by the light of that illuminating countenance. That Lowell did not at once throw away all doubts and accept Lincoln at the valuation he later placed upon him was due to the facts that Lincoln revealed himself only by degrees in his speech and act, and that while he was then making himself known Lowell was cherishing an ideal of his country and its destiny which called for the loftiest expression of patriotism. He was above all eager for a demonstration of high courage and fearless insistence upon national supremacy, when the country seemed rocking with inconstancy. That he should confess in Lincoln the “new American” was an evidence that the pure idealism which had marked Lowell’s political thinking and writing, an idealism moreover conjoined with shrewd practical sense, had at last found, to his profound satisfaction, a great exemplar, and the life and death of this wonderful product of the American soil presaged for him the development of a race of freemen.