her education, and to her spiritual faith as the foundation of these, she will teach the teachers and rule the rulers of America. Her mechanics, her farmers, will toil better; she will repair mischief; she will furnish what is wanted in the hour of need; her sailors will man the Constitution, her mechanics repair the broken rail; her troops will be the first in the field to vindicate the majesty of a free nation, and remain last on the field to secure it. Her genius will write the laws and her historians record the fate of nations. In an age of trade and material prosperity, we have stood a little stupefied by the elevation of our ancestors. We praised the Puritans because we did not find in ourselves the spirit to do the like. We praised with a certain adulation the invariable valor of the old war-gods and war-councilors of the Revolution. Washington has seemed an exceptional virtue. This praise was a concession of unworthiness in those who had so much to say of it. The heroes only shared this power of a sentiment which, if it now breathes into us, will make it easy for us to understand them, and we shall not longer flatter them. Let us shame the fathers by superior virtue in the sons. It is almost a proverb that a great man has not a great son. Bacon, Newton, and Washington were childless. But in Boston Nature is more indulgent, and has given good sons to good sires, or at least continued merit in the same blood. The elder President Adams has to divide voices of fame with the younger President Adams. The elder Otis could hardly excel the popular eloquence of the younger Otis; and the Quincy of the Revolution seems compensated for the shortness of his bright career in the son who so long lingers among the last of those bright clouds, "That on the steady breeze of honor sail In long succession calm and beautiful." Here stands to-day as of yore our little city of the rocks; here let her stand forever, on the man-bearing granite of the North! Let her stand fast by herself! She has grown great. She is filled with strangers, but she can prosper only by adhering to her faith. every child that is born of her and every child of her adoption see to it to keep the name of Boston as clean as the sun; and in distant ages her motto shall be the prayer of millions on all the hills that gird the town, "As with our fathers, so God be with us! (Sicut patribus, sit Deus nobis !) Spring, 1861. Ralph Waldo Emerson. Let JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. AFTER a man's long work is over and the sound of his voice is still, those in whose regard he has held a high place find his image strangely simplified and summarized. The hand of death, in passing over it, has smoothed the folds, has made it more typical and general. The figure retained by the memory is compressed and intensified; accidents have dropped away from it and shades have ceased to count; it stands, sharply, for a few estimated and cherished things, rather than, nebulously, for a swarm of possibilities. We cut the silhouette, in a word, out of the confusion of life, we save and fix the outline, and it is with his eye on this profiled distinction that the critic speaks. It is his function to speak with assurance, when once his impression has become final; and it is in one. noting this circumstance that I perceive how slenderly prompted I am to deliver myself on such an occasion as a critic. It is not that due conviction is absent; it is only that the function is a cold It is not that the final impression is dim; it is only that it is made on a softer part of the spirit than the critical sense. The process is more mystical, the deposited image is insistently personal, the generalizing principle is that of loyalty. I can therefore not pretend to write of James Russell Lowell in the tone of detachment and classification; I can only offer a few anticipatory touches for a portrait that asks for a steadier hand. It may be professional prejudice, but as the whole color of his life was literary, so it seems to me that we may see in his high and happy fortune the most substantial honor gathered by the practice of letters from a world preoccupied with other things. It was in looking at him as a man of letters that one got closest to him, and some of his more fanatical friends are not to be deterred from regarding his career as in the last analysis a tribute to the dominion of style. This is the idea that his name most promptly evokes, to my sense; and though it was not by any means the only idea he cherished, the unity of his career is surely to be found in it. He carried style the style of literature · into regions in which we rarely look for it into politics, of all places in the world, into diplomacy, into stammering civic dinners and ponderous anniversaries, into letters and notes and tele grams, into every turn of the hour absolutely into conversation, where indeed it freely disguised itself as intensely colloquial wit. Any friendly estimate of him is foredoomed to savor potently of reminiscence, so that I may mention how vividly I recall the occasion on which he first struck me as completely representative. the essence of it was all there, on the eve of his going as minister to Spain. It was late in the summer of 1877; he spent a few days in London on his way to Madrid, in the hushed gray August, and I remember dining with him at a dim little hotel in Park Street, which I had never entered before and have never entered since, but which, whenever I pass it, seems to look at me with the melancholy of those inanimate things that have participated. That particular evening remained, in my fancy, a kind of bridge between his old bookish and his new worldly life; which however had much more in common than they had in distinction. He turned the pages of the later experience with very much the same contemplative reader's sense with which, in his library, he had, for years, smoked the student's pipe over a thousand volumes; the only dif ference was that a good many of the leaves were still to cut. At any rate, he was enviably gay and amused, and this preliminary hour struck me, literally, as the reward of consistency. It was tinted with the promise of a singularly interesting future, but the saturated American time was all behind it, and what was to come seemed an ideal opportunity for the nourished mind. That the American years had been diluted with several visits to Europe was not a flaw in the harmony, for to recollect certain other foreign occasions — pleasant Parisian and delightful Italian strolls-was to remember that if these had been months of absence for him, they were for me, on the wings of his talk, hours of repatriation. This talk was humorously and racily fond, charged with a perfect drollery of reference to the other country (there were always two- the one we were in and the one we were n't), the details of my too sketchy conception of which, admitted for argument, he showed endless good nature in filling in. It was a joke pol The association could only grow, but ished by much use that I was dread fully at sea about my native land; and it would have been pleasant indeed to know even less than I did, so that I might have learned the whole story from Mr. Lowell's lips. His America was a country worth hearing about, a magnificent conception, an admirably consistent and lovable object of allegiance. If the sign that, in Europe, one knew him best by was his intense national consciousness, one felt that this consciousness could not sit lightly on a man in whom it was the strongest form of piety. Fortunately for him, and for his friends, he was one of the most whimsical, one of the wittiest, of human beings, so that he could play with his patriotism and make it various. All the same, one felt in it, in talk, the depth of passion that hums through much of his finest verse almost the only passion that, to my sense, his poetry contains, the accent of chivalry, of the lover, the knight ready to do battle for his mistress. Above all it was a particular allegiance to New England -a quarter of the earth in respect to which the hand of long habit, of that affection which is usually half convenience, never let go the prime idea, the standard. New England was heroic to him, for he felt in his pulses the whole his tory of her origines; it was impossible to know him without a sense that he had a rare divination of the hard realities of her past. The Biglow Papers show to what a tune he could play with his patriotism—all literature contains, I think, no finer sport; but he is serious enough when he speaks of the He was never at trouble to conceal his respect for such an origin as that, and when he came to Europe in 1877 this sentiment was one of the things he brought with him at the top of his luggage. One of the others was the extraordinary youthfulness which could make a man considerably younger than himself (so that it was only with the lapse of years that the relation of age settled upon the right note) constantly forget that he had copious antecedents. In the times when the difference counted for more — old Cambridge days that seem far away now I doubtless thought him more professorial than he felt, but I am sure that in the sequel I never thought him younger. The boy in him was never more articulate than during the last summer that he spent in England, two years before his death. Since the recollection comes of itself, I may mention, as my earliest impression of him, the charm. that certain of his Harvard lectures on English literature, on Old Frenchhad for a very immature person who was supposed to be pursuing, in one of the schools, a very different branch of knowledge, but who on dusky winter afternoons escaped with irresponsible zeal into the glow of Mr. Lowell's learned lamplight, the particular incidence of which, in the small, still lecture-room, and the illumination of his head and hands, I recall with extreme vividness. He talked communicatively of style, and where else, in all the place, was any such talk to be heard? It made a romance of the hour-it made even a picture of the scene; it was an unforgettable initiation. If he was American enough in Europe, in America he was abundantly European. He was so steeped in history and literature that to some yearning young persons he made the taste of knowledge sweeter, almost, than it was ever to be again. He was redolent, intellectually speaking, of Italy and Spain; he had lived in long intimacy with Dante and Calderon; he embodied, to envious aspirants, the happy intellectual fortune independent years in a full library, years of acquisition without haste and without rest, a robust love of study which went sociably arm in arm with a robust love of life. This love of life was so strong in him that he could lose himself in little diversions as well as in big books. He was fond of everything human and natural, everything that had color and character, and no gayety, no sense of comedy, was ever more easily kindled by contact. When he was not surrounded by great pleasures he could find his account in small ones, and no situation could be dull for a man in whom all reflection, all reaction, was witty. I waited some years really to know him, but it was to find at once that he was delightful to walk with. He spent the winter of 1872-73 in Paris, and if I had not already been fond of the streets of that city, his example and companionship would have made me so. We both had the habit of long walks, and he knew his Paris as he knew all his subjects. The history of a thing was always what he first saw in it--he recognized it as a link in an interminable chain. He led, at this season, the most home-keeping, book-buying life, and Old French texts made his evenings dear to him. He had dropped (and where he dropped he usually stayed) into an intensely local and extremely savory little hotel in the Faubourg Saint-Germain, unknown to tourists but patronized by deputies, where the table d'hôte, at which the host sat down with the guests and contradiction flourished, was a page of Balzac, full of illustration for the humorist. I used sometimes, of a Sunday evening, to dine there, and to this day, on rainy winter nights, I never cross the Seine amid the wet flare of the myriad. lamps, never note the varnished rush of the river or the way the Louvre grows superb in the darkness, without a recur rent consciousness of the old sociable errand, the sense of dipping into a still denser Paris, with the Temps and M. Sarcey in my pocket. We both spent the following winter - he at least the larger part of it— in Florence, out of manifold memories of which certain hours in his company, certain charmed Italian afternoons in Boboli gardens, on San Miniato terraces, come back to me with a glow of their own. He had indeed memories of earlier Italian times, some of which he has admirably recorded — anecdotes, tormenting to a late comer, of the superseded, the missed. He himself, in his perpetual freshness, seemed to come so late that it was always a surprise to me that he had started so early. Almost any Italy, however, was good enough for him, and he kept criticism for great occasions, for the wise relapse. the study-chair and the vanquished hesitation (not timid, but overbrimming, like a vessel dangerous to move) of that large prose pen which was so firm when once set in motion. He liked the Italian people he liked the people everywhere, and the warm street life and the exquisite idiom; the Tuscan tongue, indeed. so early ripe and yet still so perfectly alive, was one of the comforts of the world to him. He produced that winter a poem so ample and noble that it was worthy to come into being in classic air -the magnificent elegy on the death of Agassiz, which strikes me as a summary of all his vigors and felicities, his most genial achievement, and (after the Harvard Commemoration Ode) the truest expression of his poetic nature. It is hard to lend to a great old house, in Italy, even when it has become a modern inn, any associations as romantic as those it already wears; but what the high-windowed face of the Florentine Hôtel du Nord speaks to nie of to-day. over its chattering cab-stand and across the statued pillar of the little square of the Holy Trinity, is neither its ancient honor nor its actual fall, but the sound, one December evening, by the fire the poet pronounces "starved," of "I cannot think he wished so soon to die With all his senses full of eager heat, And rosy years that stood expectant by To buckle the winged sandals on their feet, He that was friends with Earth, and all her sweet Took with both hands unsparingly." y Of Mr. Lowell's residence in Spain I know nothing but what I gathered from his talk, after he took possession, late in the spring of 1879, of the post in London rendered vacant by the retirement of Mr. John Welsh; much of it inevitably referring to the domestic sorrow -the prolonged illness of his admirable wife-which cast over these years a cloud that darkened further during the early part of his English period. I remember getting from him a sense that a diplomatic situation at Madrid was not quite so enlivening as might have been expected, and that for the American representative, at least, there was not enough business to give a savor to duty. This particular representative's solution of every personal problem, however, was a page of philology in a cloud of tobacco, and as he had seen the picture before through his studies, so now he doubtless saw his studies through the picture. The palace was a part of it, where the ghost of Charles V. still walked and the princesses were what is called in princesses literary. The diplomatic circle was animated if that be the word by whist; what his own share of the game was animated by may be left to the imagination of those who remember the irrepressibility, on his lips, of the comic idea. It might have been taken for granted he was well content to be transferred to England; but I have no definite recollection of the degree of his satisfaction beforehand. I think he was mainly conscious of the weight of the new responsibility, so that the unalloyed pleasure was that of his friends and of the most enlightened part of the public in the two countries, to which the appointment appeared to have an unusual felicity. It was made, as it were, for quality, and that continued to be the sign of the function so long as Mr. Lowell exercised it. The difficulty if I may speak of difficulty was that all judgment of it was necessarily a priori. It was impossible for him to know what a success, in vulgar parlance, he might make of a totally untried character, and above all to foresee how this character would adapt itself to his own. During the years of his residence in London on an official footing it constantly struck me that it was the office that inclined, at every turn, to him, rather than he who inclined to the office. I may appear to speak too much of this phase of his life as the most memorable part of it - especially considering how short a time it occupied in regard to the whole; but in addition to its being the only long phase of which I can speak at all closely from personal observation, it is just to remember that these were the years in which all the other years were made most evident. "We knew him and valued him ages before, and never stinted our appreciation, never waited to care for him till he had become the fashion," his American readers and listeners, his pupils and colleagues, might say; to which the answer is that those who admired him most were just those who might naturally rejoice in the multiplication of his opportunities. He came to London with only a vague notion, evidently, of what these opportunities were to be, and in fact there was no defining them in advance; what they proved to be, on the spot, was anything and everything that he might make them. I remember hearing him say, a day or two after his arrival, "Oh, I've lost all my wityou must n't look to me for good things now." The words were uttered to a gentleman who had found one of his |