CHAPTER VIII

LOWELL AS A PUBLIC SPEAKER

It will be as well to bring into one chapter such references to Lowell’s work as a public speaker as may give some idea of the interest with which he was always heard, and, indeed, of his own evident enjoyment of the position of an orator.

He spoke with absolute simplicity, with entire ease, and he really enjoyed public speaking.

It was near the close of the first quarter of the century that what was called the “lyceum system” came into being in New England. It worked wonderfully well under the original plans. The institution, as it may be called, or the habit, if you please, of lecturing and listening to lectures, was formed again, probably never to be abandoned in our communities. The method by which this was done in the New England towns worked well for a generation. And Lowell, as a youngster starting on life, made some of his first addresses “under the auspices” of the old-fashioned lyceum committees.

I am rather fond of saying, what nobody seems to care for excepting myself, that high among the causes which sent Winthrop’s colony to Massachusetts was the passion of such men as he to hear lectures on week-days. Now this was important. It means that the contest between the “left wing” and the “right wing” in the English Church turned largely on the wish of the more advanced clergy to speak in other pulpits than their own, and the greater wish of the Puritan people to hear them. Of course, if a bishop could shut up a man in his own pulpit, the influence of one of the Garrisons, or Phillipses, or Parkers, or Pillsburys of the day would be very much restricted. But so long as John Cotton could travel over half England, he was much more formidable to Bishop Laud and the other people who directed the Establishment than he would have been if he had remained in his own pulpit in the Lincolnshire Boston.

So there grew up for that generation the habit of a week-day lecture in the New England meeting-houses; a habit preserved with more or less interest to the present day. But as time went by, these week-day lectures, so far as I recollect them, were little more than the repetition of sermons which had been preached on Sunday. Now, if there is anything dangerous anywhere for a lecturer’s usefulness, it is a habit of repeating the average sermon. A sermon is one thing and a lyceum lecture is another. A lyceum lecture has one purpose, and a sermon ought to have another purpose. However this may be, the people of the generations of this century who did not much like to go to the “Thursday lecture” in Boston, or similar lectures in other towns, were very glad to hear the best speakers of the time. And they generally gave them more latitude than was to be found in the creed-bound churches of the time.

I do not think I stray too far from our central subject if I take a few lines to speak of the value to the whole Northern community of this very curious system. To introduce such men as have been named above, and a hundred other men, some of them of equal prominence in our history, and all of them of a certain ability as public speakers,—to introduce such men to the average community of the North, so that it knew them personally, was in itself a great achievement. To go back to the comparison which I have made already, these Peter the Hermits, passing from place to place, preached a crusade. They were in very much the position of John Cotton and those other Puritan lecturers whom Bishop Laud and the Star Chamber disliked in England. And the history of the twenty years before our Civil War is not rightly written unless it refers to the effect which was wrought by such speakers. Phillips, Parker, Ward Beecher, and even Garrison, would have been little known outside a small circle around their respective homes but for this lecturing practice.

There will be found in Lowell’s letters and in other memoranda of the time an occasional joke about the external hardships of the thing. He speaks somewhere of three “committeemen,” with three cold hands like raw beefsteak, welcoming him and bidding him good-by. But such little jokes as this must not give a false idea of the reception which was given to the pioneers of larger thought than that which the hidebound churches of the time were willing to interpret. For one such story of the beefsteak hands there could be told a thousand stories of warm welcomes into charming families, and of immediate mutual recognition of people of kindred thought who would never have seen each other’s faces but for the happy appointment which brought one as a lecturer to the other as “committeeman.” Anything that taught the separated people of this country that it was a country, that they were citizens of the same nation, and that they had each other’s burdens to bear, was of great value in those days. The reader of to-day forgets that in the same years in which South Carolina was defying the North, Massachusetts gave directions that the national flag should not float over her State House. That is to say, in those days there was an intense sensitiveness which kept men of different sections of the country apart from each other. Anything which overcame such sensitiveness, and brought real lovers of their country and lovers of God face to face, was an advantage. In this case the advantage can hardly be overestimated.

To this hour the popular lecture in America differs from the lecture, so called, which the Useful Knowledge Society of England, and what they used to call Mechanics’ Institutes, established there in the earlier part of the century. Mr. Emerson told me that when he delivered his lectures in London, intelligent people went back to Coleridge’s morning lectures, of a dozen or more years before, as a precedent. And you see in the accounts of Carlyle’s London lectures that it was regarded as a novelty that anything should be said at a lecture which decently intelligent people needed to hear. But in October, 1843, Emerson wrote to his friend John Sterling, “There is now a ‘lyceum,’ so called, in almost every town in New England, and if I would accept an invitation I might read a lecture every night.” Sterling had written to him not long before, “I doubt whether there are anywhere in Britain, except in London, a hundred persons to be found capable of at all appreciating what seems to find, as spoken by you, such ready acceptance from various bodies of learners in America.” Such people meet, in their moribund feudal fashion, “to encourage the others,” as Sir Walter Vivian looked on the experiments in his own park, or as Murat charged at Borodino. The amusing condescension, so often observable in the English pulpit, is even more marked in the English “popular lecture.”

But, in the beginning, it was not so here. As early as 1814 Jacob Bigelow had lectured on botany in Boston, and, not long after, Edward Everett on Greek art and antiquities, and Henry Ware on the Holy Land, in courses of lectures, which were attended by the very best and most intelligent people. And when Waldo Emerson, and Theodore Parker, and Wendell Phillips, and James Lowell lectured in the same region, they gave the best they could give, and no one thought he condescended in going to hear.

I do not forget a bright saying of Starr King, one of those best worth hearing of the brilliant group of traveling lecturers of whom Lowell was one. King said that a popular lyceum lecture was made of five parts of sense and five of nonsense. “There are only five men in America,” said he, “who know how to mix them—and I think I am one of the five.” Other people thought so too, and did not detect the nonsense. His carefully wrought lectures are worth anybody’s study to-day.

He is the author of another lyceum chestnut. Some one asked him what his honorarium was for each lecture. “F.A. M.E.,” said he—“Fifty And My Expenses.”

Lowell’s hearers got no nonsense. His subjects were generally literary or critical—I think always so. On one or more expeditions he went to what was then the Far West—speaking in Wisconsin, I observe, within twenty years after Black Hawk and Keokuk addressed Americans on the same fields.

(Ah me! Why did I not accept forty acres of land between the lakes in Madison, Wisconsin, when they were offered me in 1842? The reader will perhaps pardon this digression!)

Of such a system of Wanderjähre in the education of a country, not the least benefit is that which is gained by the speaker. No man knows America who has not traveled much in her different regions. A wise United States Senator proposed lately that each newly elected member of Congress should be compelled to travel up and down his own country for those mysterious months after his election before he takes his seat. The men who have had such a privilege do not make the mistakes of book-trained men.

A good enough illustration of some of the deeper consequences of what may be called the lyceum movement may be found in the story often told of the divided committee who met Wendell Phillips in a place where he was quite a stranger. On his arrival he asked what was the subject he was to speak on. Should he read his lecture on the Lost Arts, or should he deliver an address on Anti-Slavery? It proved, alas! that the committee was equally divided, perhaps bitterly divided, and neither side would yield to the other. Phillips at once made the determination with his own prompt wit. He said he would deliver the lecture on the Lost Arts first, and then the Anti-Slavery address afterwards for any who wanted to stay and hear. Of course, after they had heard him, everybody stayed, and so he had the whole town to hear his radical appeal, where otherwise he would have had only that half the town which was convinced already.

Under a law which may be called divine, the students, in all colleges where they had the choice of anniversary orators, always elected the speakers who, as they thought, would be most disagreeable to the college government. So Emerson, Parker, and Phillips came to be favorite college speakers in colleges where the faculties would gladly have suppressed all knowledge of the men. Mr. Emerson’s address at Dartmouth in 1838 would never have been delivered but for the action of this law. This address, when printed, lying on the counter of a book-shop in Oxford, gave to Gladstone his first knowledge of the New England Plato.

It is amusing now, and in a way it is pathetic, to see how this youngster Lowell, even before he was of age, caught at the floating straw of a Lyceum engagement whenever he could, in the hope of earning a little money. This was simply that he felt the mortification which every bright boy feels when, after being told that he is a man by some college authority, he finds that he is still living in his father’s house, eating at his father’s table, wearing clothes which his father pays for, and even asking his father for spending-money. There is a note from him to Loring to ask if the “Andover Lyceum” will pay as much as five dollars for a lecture.

The reader must understand that in the “Lyceum system,” so called, it was considered as a sort of duty for educated men to have on hand a lecture or two which they were willing to read to any audience which was willing to ask them. This was, by the way, in precise fulfillment of that somewhat vague commission which constitutes the degree of a Master of Arts. The person who is fortunate enough to receive this diploma is told that he has the privilege of “speaking in public as often as any one asks him to do so.” This is my free translation of “publice profitendi.” Those words never really meant “public profession.” In our modern days we are a little apt to take this privilege without the permission of the university.

Educated men accepted such appointments as their contribution to public education. It was just as the same men served on the school committee or board of selectmen, and would have been insulted if anybody had proposed to pay them anything for doing it. In many cases, perhaps in most cases, no tickets were bought or sold. The selectmen gave the Town Hall for a lyceum, or the First Parish gave the use of its meeting-house for a lyceum, as they would have done for a temperance meeting or a missionary meeting. But, of course, it soon appeared that if the audiences were to have continuous courses of lectures, somebody must be paid for them, and somebody must pay. College professors were engaged to give elementary courses on scientific or historical subjects. As early as 1832 Mr. Emerson delivered a course of biographical lectures at the request of the Massachusetts Society for Diffusing Useful Knowledge. And in the years of the 30’s in Boston there were maintained through the winter public courses almost every evening in the week, by at least five different organizations—the Society for Diffusing Useful Knowledge, the Boston Lyceum, the Mercantile Library Association, the Mechanics’ Association, and sometimes the Historical Society. For all these courses tickets were sold at low rates, but for enough to enable the societies to pay the lecturers a small honorarium. From such arrangements as these the custom spread of recompensing the lecturer for his work; and at this moment, in an average New England town, people will not go to a lecture if they think the lecturer has “given” his service. The public thinks that if not worth pay, it is not worth hearing.

In this arrangement of the lyceum, Lowell found his place before he was of age. He was always an easy and a ready speaker, and, as I have said, he enjoyed public speaking. Before long, his interest in the temperance reform and the anti-slavery reform brought him occasionally on the platform. He spoke with perfect ease. On such occasions he spoke without notes, never speaking without knowing what he had to say, and always saying it. But I think he never delivered a lecture, as he would have called it, without a manuscript written out in full.

The first account he gives of his public speaking is that of the celebration of the Cambridgeport Women’s Total Abstinence Society on the Fourth of July, 1842. “There were more than three thousand in all, it was said. I was called out, and made a speech of about ten minutes, from the top of a bench, to an audience of two thousand, as silent as could be. I spoke of the beauty of having women present, and of their influence and interest in reforms. I ended with the following sentiment: ‘The proper place of woman—at the head of the pilgrims back to purity and truth.’ In the midst of my speech I heard many demonstrations of satisfaction and approval—one voice saying, ‘Good!’ in quite an audible tone. I was told that my remarks were ‘just the thing.’ When I got up and saw the crowd, it inspired me. I felt as calm as I do now, and could have spoken an hour with ease. I did not hesitate for a word or expression even once.“

Alas! the Boston papers of the day had Mr. Tyler’s “third veto” to print, and the news from England by a late arrival; and no word could be spared for poor James’s first essay. What saith the Vulgate? “Nullum prophetam in actis diurnis honorari.”

As it proved, he was brought face to face with large numbers of persons who would otherwise never have seen him, by delivering lectures in various courses through the Northern and Northwestern States; but this did not begin until a period as late as 1855. What I have said of his easy speaking is the remark of a person who heard him, as I have often heard him. I never spoke with any one who had heard him who did not say the same thing. But he himself did not always feel the sort of confidence in his power in this way which would have seemed natural. I am told by many persons who had to introduce him upon such occasions, that he would be doubtful and anxious about his power with an audience before he began. And he was excessively sensitive about any accident by which he forgot a word or in any way seemed to himself to have tripped in his discourse.

In 1853 he was invited to deliver a course of lectures before the Lowell Institute. These lectures were eventually delivered in January and February of 1855.

Because the great system of public instruction which is carried on by this Institute bears the name of his family, I will give some little account of it here. Stimulated by the success of what we have been speaking of, the lyceum system of the Northern States, John Lowell, Jr., a cousin of James Russell Lowell, had founded this Institute. His wife and all his children had died. His own health was delicate, and he undertook a long journey abroad. While in Egypt he made his will, in which he left $250,000 for the beginning of a fund for carrying on public instruction by means of lectures. It is said that it was executed literally under the shadow of the ruins of Luxor.

By this instrument he left to trustees the sum which has been named, the interest of which should be expended for maintaining free public lectures for the instruction of any who should choose to attend. The will provided that nine tenths of the income should be thus expended for the immediate purposes of every year. The remaining tenth is every year added to the principal fund. The investments have been carefully and successfully made, and as the will went into effect in the year 1839, the fund is now very much larger than it was when he died.

It has been admirably administered from the beginning. The first Americans in the walks of science or of literature have been proud to be enrolled on the list of its lecturers, and in many instances the most distinguished savants from Europe have been called over with the special purpose of lecturing to its audiences.

Before 1855 Lowell was, I may say, universally known and universally admired. The announcement that he was to deliver a course of twelve lectures on English poetry was gladly received in Boston. It proved at once that it would be necessary to repeat the lectures in the afternoons for a new audience of those who could not enter the hall in the evening. But in both afternoon and evening courses multitudes were turned away for whom there was no room in the hall. A much larger “audience” was made up by the people who read the lectures from day to day in the newspaper. My father and brother, who then conducted the “Daily Advertiser,” arranged with Mr. Lowell that his old friend Mr. Robert Carter should prepare the manuscript for that paper, and thus the “Advertiser” printed each lecture on the day after its second delivery, with the omission only of some of the extracts from the poets of whom he was speaking.

These reports were carefully preserved by some scrap-book makers, and from one of the scrap-books thus made the Rowfant Club of Cleveland printed an elegant limited edition in 1897.

I borrow from another the description of Mr. Lowell’s manner as a speaker in delivering these and similar addresses. This writer, who is not known to me, says, first, that Mr. Lowell never imitates the stump speaker and never falls into the drollery of the comedian. “His pronunciation is clear and precise; the modulations of his voice are unstudied and agreeable, but he seldom if ever raised a hand for gesticulation, and his voice was kept in its natural compass. He read like one who had something of importance to utter, and the just emphasis was felt in the penetrating tone. There were no oratorical climaxes, and no pitfalls set for applause.”

The subjects of the twelve lectures are these: 1. Definitions. 2. Piers Ploughman’s Vision. 3. The Metrical Romances. 4. The Ballads. 5. Chaucer. 6. Spenser. 7. Milton. 8. Butler. 9. Pope. 10. Poetic Diction. 11. Wordsworth. 12. The Function of the Poet.

It is no wonder that the lectures were so popular. They are of the best reading to this day, full of fun, full of the most serious thought as well. And you find in them at every page, I may say, seeds which he has planted elsewhere for other blossoms and fruit. For instance, here is his description of a New England spring:—

“In our New England especially, where May-day is a mere superstition and the May-pole a poor, half-hardy exotic which shivers in an east wind almost as sharp as Endicott’s axe—where frozen children, in unseasonable muslin, celebrate the floral games with nosegays from the milliners, and winter reels back, like shattered Lear, bringing the dead spring in his arms, her budding breast and wan, dilustered cheeks all overblown with the drifts and frosty streaks of his white beard—where even Chanticleer, whose sap mounts earliest in that dawn of the year, stands dumb beneath the dripping eaves of his harem, with his melancholy tail at half-mast—one has only to take down a volume of Chaucer, and forthwith he can scarce step without crushing a daisy, and the sunshine flickers on small new leaves that throb thick with song of merle and mavis.”

We find much of this again in the “Biglow Papers;” perhaps the prose is better than the verse. Indeed, you have only to turn over the pages to find epigrams of which you might make proverbs. “Fortunately for the ballad-makers, they were not encumbered with any useless information.” “The ballads are pathetic because the poet did not try to make them so; and they are models of nervous and simple diction, because the business of the poet was to tell his story and not to adorn it.” “The only art of expression is to have something to express. We feel as wide a difference between what is manufactured and what is spontaneous as between the sparkles of an electrical machine and the wildfire of God which writes ‘_Mene, Mene_,’ on the crumbling palace walls of midnight cloud.” “Even Shakespeare, who comes after everybody has done his best, and seems to say, ‘Here, let me take hold a minute and show you how to do it,’ could not mend that.”

Let no one suppose, because these lectures are thus delivered to what is called a popular audience, that there is anything slight in the work or superficial in the handling. Lowell was not the man to slight his work because he had an audience of the people, or to treat the rank and file with more superficial consideration than the men with epaulets or sashes. Even if he had been, when he delivered one of these courses of lectures he had before him his full share of the leaders of that community, men and women to whom even a Philistine would not dare bring the work of a slop-shop.

A good deal of the thought of these lectures appears, as I have said, in other forms in some of his later publications. But, for whatever reason, he never made a separate book of them. I think he says somewhere in a private letter that he wanted to do it, and indeed had meant to do it, but that he could not make the time; and that this was a fair excuse any one will say who knows how steadily he worked and how much work he had to do in study, in teaching, in writing and proof-reading, and, in after life, in his diplomatic duties.

In 1874 Mr. Lowell was chosen the President of the Harvard Society of Alumni, and from 1863 to 1871 he was President of the Phi Beta Kappa of Cambridge. It is worth observing that no other President of the Phi Beta has ever held that position so long. His immediate predecessor was Judge Hoar, and his successor Richard Henry Dana. These two societies exist chiefly to provide for the annual dinners of Cambridge graduates at the College on Commencement Day and the day following. The fine charm of the Phi Beta dinner is that it is not expected or permitted that anything that is said shall be reported. You may look for the most bubbling fun of some of the most serious men in the world, without any terror of seeing it bewitched and reflected the next morning from the cracked mirror of some ignorant boy who, when he reads his notes, can see no difference between Voltaire and Valkyrie. But the Commencement dinners, the day before the Phi Beta dinners, are open to the reports of all men, angels, and devils, so that some of the sparks of Lowell’s infinite fun may, with proper grinding, be thrown upon the kodak still.

He officiated as President of the Alumni in 1875 and 1876. Those years, as the centennial years of the early Revolutionary events, kept every one on the alert as to New England history. Here is a short extract from each of these addresses:—

“But, gentlemen, I will not detain you with the inevitable suggestions of the occasion. These sentimentalities are apt to slip from under him who would embark on them, like a birch canoe under the clumsy foot of a cockney, and leave him floundering in retributive commonplace. I had a kind of hope, indeed, from what I had heard, that I should be unable to fill this voice-devouring hall. I had hoped to sit serenely here, with a tablet in the wall before me inscribed: ‘Guilielmo Roberto Ware, Henrico Van Brunt, optime de Academia meritis, eo quod facundiam postprandialem irritam fecerunt.’ [The reader must recognize here the distinguished architects of Memorial Hall, which was then newly built.] I hope you understood my Latin, and I hope you will forgive me the antiquity of the pronunciation, but it is simply because I cannot help it. Then, on a blackboard behind me, I could have written in large letters the names of our guests, who should make some brave dumb show of acknowledgment. You, at least, with your united applause, could make yourselves heard. If brevity ever needed an excuse, I might claim one in the fact that I have consented, at short notice, to be one of the performers in our domestic centennial next Saturday, and poetry is not a thing to be delivered on demand without an exhausting wear upon the nerves. When I wrote to Dr. Holmes and begged him for a little poem, I got the following answer, which I shall take the liberty of reading. I do not see the Doctor himself in the hall, which encourages me to go on:—

“‘My dear James,—Somebody has written a note in your name, requesting me to furnish a few verses for some occasion which he professes to be interested in. I am satisfied, of course, that it is a forgery. I know you would not do such a thing as ask a brother writer, utterly exhausted by his centennial efforts, to endanger his health and compromise his reputation by any damnable iteration of spasmodic squeezing. So I give you fair warning that some dangerous person is using your name, and taking advantage of the great love I bear you, to play upon my feelings. Do not think for a moment that I hold you in any way responsible for this note, looking so nearly like your own handwriting as for a single instant to deceive me, and suggesting the idea that I would take a passage for Europe in season to avoid college anniversaries.’

“I readily excused him, and I am sure you will be kind enough to be charitable to me, gentlemen. I know that one of the things which the graduates of the College look forward to with the most confident expectation and pleasure is the report of the President of the University. I remember that when I was in the habit of attending the meetings of the faculty, some fourteen or fifteen years ago, I was very much struck by the fact that almost every field of business that required particular ability was sure to gravitate into the hands of a young professor of chemistry. The fact made so deep an impression upon me that I remember that I used to feel, when our war broke out, that this young professor might have to take the care of one of our regiments,—and I know he would have led it to victory. And when I heard that the same professor was nominated for President, I had no doubt of the result which we have all seen to follow. I give you, gentlemen, the health of President Eliot, of Harvard College!”

Holding the same honorable though honorary office the next year, before introducing the speakers, he said:—

“The common consent of civilized mankind seems to have settled on the centennial commemoration of great events as leaving an interval spacious enough to be impressive and having a roundness of completion in its period. We are the youngest of nations, and the centuries to us are not yet grown so cheap and so commonplace as Napoleon’s, when he saw forty of them looking down in undisguised admiration upon his armies bronzed from their triumphs in Italy. For my own part, I think the scrutiny of one age is quite enough to bear, without calling in thirty-nine others to its assistance. It is quite true that a hundred years are but as a day in the life of a nation, are but as a tick of the clock to the long train of æons in which this planet hardened itself for the habitation of man and man accommodated himself to his habitation; but they are all we have, and we must make the best of them. Perhaps, after all, it is no such great misfortune to be young, especially if we are conscious at that time that youth means opportunity and not accomplishment. I think that, after all, when we look back upon the hundred years through which the country has passed, the vista is not so disheartening as to the indigestive fancy it might at first appear. If we have lost something of that Arcadian simplicity which the French travelers of a hundred years ago found here,—perhaps because they looked for it, perhaps because of their impenetrability by the English tongue,—we have lost something also of that self-sufficiency which is the mark as well of provincials as of barbarians, and which is the great hindrance to all true advancement. It is a wholesome symptom, I think, if we are beginning to show some of the talent for grumbling which is the undoubted heirloom of the race to which most of us belong. Even the Fourth of July oration is changing round into a lecture on our national shortcomings, and the proud eagle himself is beginning to have no little misgiving as to the amplitude between the tips of his wings. But while it may be admitted that our government was more decorously administered one hundred years ago, if our national housekeeping to-day is further removed from honest business principles, and therefore is more costly, morally and financially, than that of any other Christian nation, it is not less true that the hundredth year of our existence finds us, in the mass, very greatly advanced in the refinement and culture and comfort that are most operative in making a country civilized and keeping it so.”

On three occasions, at least, Lowell substituted for a prose lecture a poem to which he gave the name of “The Power of Sound.” It is constructed on the simple system which runs back as far as “The Pleasures of Imagination,” giving us, for instance, the “Pleasures of Hope” and the “Pleasures of Memory.” In these prehistoric days of which I write, it was what you rather expected in a college poem: a convenient thread on which to string the beads which might else have been lying unused in box or basket.

Lowell gave the original copy of this poem to Mr. Norton, who edited it carefully with interesting notes for an elegant edition of a few copies printed by Mr. Holden. Some of the lines and several of the illustrations in other forms were used by him elsewhere, and may be found in his published poems:—

“Steps have their various meanings—who can hear The long, slow tread, deliberate and clear, The boot that creaks and gloats on every stair, And the firm knock which says, ‘I know you’re there,’ Nor quake at portents which so oft before Have been the heralds of the ten-inch bore?

“He enters, and he sits, as crowners sit, On the dead bodies of our time and wit; Hopes that no plan of yours he comes to balk, And grinds the hurdy-gurdy of his talk In steady circles, meaningless and flat As the broad brim that rounds a bishop’s hat. Nature, didst thou endow him with a voice, As mothers give great drums to little boys, To teach us sadly how much outward din Is based on bland vacuity within?

“Who, untouched, could leave Those Hebrew songs that triumph, trust, or grieve? Verses that smite the soul as with a sword, And open all the abysses with a word? How many a soul have David’s tears washed white, His wings borne upward to the Source of light! How many his triumph nerved with martyr-will, His faith from turmoil led to waters still! They were his songs that rose to heaven before The surge of steel broke wild o’er Marston Moor, When rough-shod workmen in their sober gear Rode down in dust the long-haired cavalier; With these once more the Mayflower’s cabin rang, From men who trusted in the God they sang, And Plymouth heard them, poured on bended knees, From wild cathedrals arched with centuried trees. They were grim men, unlovely—yes, but great— Who prayed around the cradle of our State. Small room for light and sentimental strains In those lean men with empires in their brains, Who their young Israel saw in vision clasp The mane of either sea with taming grasp; Who pitched a state as other men pitch tents, And led the march of time to great events.

“O strange new world, that yet wast never young, Whose youth from thee by tyrannous need was wrung, Brown foundling of the forests, with gaunt eyes, Orphan and heir of all the centuries, Who on thy baby leaf-bed in the wood Grew’st frugal plotting for to-morrow’s food; And thou, dear Bay State, mother of us all, Forget not in new cares thine ancient call!

“Though all things else should perish in the sod, Hold with firm clutch thy Pilgrim faith in God, And the calm courage that deemed all things light Whene’er the inward voice said, ‘_This is right!_’ If for the children there should come a time Like that which tried the fathers’ faith sublime (Which God avert!), if Tyranny should strive On limbs New-England-made to lock her gyve, Let Kansas answer from her reddened fields, ‘’Tis bastard, and not Pilgrim blood, that yields!’”

Until his death, his well-earned reputation as a public speaker made constant calls on him for service in such directions. But no lover of Lowell will suppose that lecturing to large audiences or to small was much more than an “avocation” with him. The “Fable for Critics,” the “Biglow Papers,” and other books belong to years when he was hard at work as a college professor. His contributions to the journals which were influential in reform still continued, though not so frequent as before.

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