"things" very good, and who, having a political speech to make in a day or two, had thriftily asked his leave to bring it in. There could have been no better example of the experimental nature of his acceptance of the post; for the very foundation of the distinction that he gave it was his great reserve of wit. He had no idea how much he had left till he tried it, and he had never before had so much occasion to try it. This uncertainty might pervade the minds even of such of his friends as had a near view of his start; but those friends would have had singularly little imagination if they had failed to be struck, in a general way, with the highly civilized character of his mission. There are circumstances in operation (too numerous to recite) which combine to undermine greatly the felicity of the representative of the United States in a foreign country; it is, to speak summarily, in many respects a singularly uncomfortable honor. I cannot express more strongly how happy Mr. Lowell's opportunity seemed to be than by saying that he struck people at the moment as enviable. It was an intensification of the impression given by the glimpse of him on his way to Spain. The true reward of an English style was to be sent to England, and if his career in that country was, throughout, amusing, in the highest sense of the term, this result was, for others at least, a part of their gratified suspense as to the further possibilities of the style.

From the friendly and intimate point of view it was presumable from the first that there would be a kind of drama, a spectacle; and if one had already lived a few years in London one could have an interesting prevision of some of its features. London is a great personage, and with those with whom she establishes a relation she always plays, as it were, her game. This game, throughout Mr. Lowell's residence, but especial ly during the early part, was exciting;

so much so that I remember being positively sorry, as if I were leaving the theatre before the fall of the curtain, when, at that time, more than once, I found myself, by visits to the Continent, obliged to turn my back upon it. The sight of his variety was a help to know London better; and it was a question whether he could ever know her so well as those who could freely consider the pair together. He offered her from the first a nut to crack, a morsel to roll under her tongue. She is the great consumer of spices and sweets; if I were not afraid of forcing the image, I should say that she is too unwieldy to feed herself, and requires, in recurring seasons, as she sits, prodigiously, at her banquet, to be approached with the consecrated ladle. She placed this implement in Mr. Lowell's hands with a confidence so immediate as to be truly touching — a confidence that speaks for the eventual amalgamation of the Anglo-Saxon race in a way that, surely, no casual friction can obliterate. She can confer conspicuity, at least for the hour, so well that she is constantly under the temptation to do so; she holds a court for those who speak to her, and she is perpetually trying voices. She recognized Mr. Lowell's from the first and appointed him really her speaker-in-chief. She has a peculiar need, which when you know her well you understand, of being eased off with herself, and the American minister speedily appeared just the man to ease her. He played into her talk and her speeches, her commemorations and functions, her dinners and discussions, her editorials and anecdotes. She has immense wheels which are always going round, and the ponderous precision of which can be observed only on the spot. They naturally demand something to grind, and the machine holds out great iron hands draws in reputations and talents, or sometimes only names and phrases.

Mr. Lowell immediately found him

self, in England, whether to his surprise or no I am unable to say, the first of after-dinner speakers. It was perhaps somewhat to the surprise of his public there, for it was not to have been calculated in advance that he would have become so expert in his own country – a country sparing of feast-days and ceremonies. His practice had been great before he came to London, but his performance there would have been a strain upon any practice. It was a point of honor with him never to refuse a challenge, and this attitude, under the circumstances, was heroic, for he became a convenience that really tended to multiply occasions. It was exactly his high competence in these directions that constituted the practical good effect of his mission, the particular manner in which it made for civilization. It was the revanche of letters; that, throughout, was the particular note of the part he played. There would have been no revanche if he had played it inadequately; therefore it was a pleasure to feel that he was accomplished up to the hilt. Those who did n't like him pronounced him too accomplished, too omniscient; but, save in a sense that I will specify, I never saw him commit himself unadvisedly, and much is to be forgiven a love of precise knowledge which keeps a man out of mistakes. He had a horror of them; no one was ever more in love with the idea of being right and of keeping others from being wrong. The famous Puritan conscience, which was a persistent part of his heredity, operated in him perhaps most strongly on the scholarly side. He enjoyed the detail of research and the discussion of differences, and he had an instinct for rectification which was unflinching. All this formed a part of the enviability I have noted - the serenity of that larger reputation which came to him late in life, which had been paid for in advance, and in regard to which his finished discharge of his diplomatic duties acted, if not, cer

tainly, as a cause, at least as a stimulus. The reputation was not, doubtless, the happiest thing; the happiest thing was the inward opportunity, the chance to absorb into an intelligence extraordinarily prepared a peculiarly full revelation.

For

He had studied English history for forty years in the texts, and at last he could study it in the pieces themselves, could handle and verify the relics. the man who in such a position recognizes his advantages, England makes herself a museum of illustration. She is at home in the comfortable dust of her ages, where there is no need of excavation, as she has never been buried, and the explorer finds the ways as open to him as the corridors of an exhibition. It was an exhibition of which Mr. Lowell never grew tired, for it was infinitely various and living; it brought him back repeatedly after his public mission had expired, and it was perpetually suggestive to him while that mission lasted. If he played his part so well here - I allude now more particularly to the social and expressive side of it it was because he was so open to suggestion. Old England spoke to him so much as a man of letters that it was inevitable he should answer her back. On the firmness and tact with which he acquitted himself of his strictly diplomatic work I shall not presume to touch; his success was promptly appreciated in quarters where the official record may be found, as well as in others less discoverable to-day, columns congruous with their vituperative "headings," where it must be looked for between the lines. These latter responsibilities, begotten mainly of the Irish complication, were heavy ones, but they were doubtless, for Mr. Lowell, the keenest interest of his term, and I include them essentially in the picture afforded by that term of the supremely symmetrical literary life the life in which the contrasts have been effectively timed; in which the invading and acclaiming world has entered too late

to interfere, to distract, but still in time to fertilize; in which contacts have multiplied and horizons widened gradually; in which, in short, the dessert has come after the dinner, the answer after the question, and the proof after the patience.

I may seem to exaggerate in Mr. Lowell's history the importance of the last dozen years of his life- especially if the reckoning be made of the amount of characteristic production that preceded them. He was the same admirable writer that he appears to-day before he touched diplomacy - he had already given to the world the volumes on which his reputation rests. I cannot undertake in this place and at this hour a critical estimate of his writings; the perspective is too short and our acquaintance too recent. But I have been reading him over in fragments, not to judge him, but to recall him, and it is as impossible to speak of him without the sense of his high place as it would be with the pretension to be final about it. He looms, in such a renewed impression, very large and ripe and sane, and if he was an admirable man of let ters there should be no want of emphasis on the first term of the title. He was indeed a man, in literature; essentially masculine and active and upright. Presenting to survivors that simplified face that I have spoken of, he almost already looks at us as the last accomplished representative of the joy of life. His robust and humorous optimism rounds itself more and more; he has even now something of the air of a classic, and if he really becomes one it will be in virtue of his having placed as fine an irony at the service of hope as certain masters of the other strain have placed at that of despair. Sturdy liberal as he was, and contemptuous of all timidities of advance and reservations of faith, one thinks of him to-day, at the point at which we leave him, as the last of the literary conservatives. He took his

stand on the ancient cheerful wisdom, many of the ingenious modern emendations of which seemed to him simply droll.

Few things were really so droll as he could make them, and not a great many, perhaps, are so absolute. The solution of the problem of life lay for him in action, in conduct, in decency; his imagination lighted up to him but scantily the region of analysis and apology. Like all interesting literary figures, he is full of tacit as well as of uttered reference to the conditions that engendered him; he really testifies as much as Hawthorne to the New England spirit, though in a totally different tone. The two writers. as witnesses, weigh against each other, and the picture would be imperfect if both had not had a hand in it. If Hawthorne expressed the mysticism and the gloom of the transplanted Puritan, his passive and haunted side, Lowell saw him in the familiar daylight of practice and prosperity and good health. The author of The Biglow Papers was surely the healthiest of highly cultivated geniuses, just as he was the least flippant of jesters and the least hysterical of poets. If Hawthorne fairly cherished the idea of evil in man, Lowell's vision of "sin" was operative mainly for a single purpose - that of putting in motion the civic lash. The Biglow Papers are mainly an exposure of national injustice and political dishonesty; his satiric ardor was simply the other side of the medal of his patriotism. His poetry is not all satirical, but the highest and most sustained flights of it are patriotic. and in reading it over I am struck with the peculiar definiteness it borrows, in parts at least, from this particular inspiration.

The look at life that it embodies is almost never vague or irresponsible; it is only the author's humor that is whimsical, never his emotion nor his passion. His poetical performance might sometimes, no doubt, be more intensely lyri

cal, but it is hard to see how it could be more intensely moral- I mean, of course, in the widest sense of the term. His play is as good as a game in the open air; but when he is serious he is as serious as Wordsworth, and much more compact. He is the poet of pluck and purpose and action, of the gayety and liberty of virtue. He commemorates all manly pieties and affections, but does not conceal his mistrust of overbrimming sensibility. If the ancients and the Elizabethans, he somewhere says, "had not discovered the picturesque, as we understand it, they found surprisingly fine scenery in man and his destiny, and would have seen something ludicrous, it may be suspected, in the spectacle of a grown man running to hide his head in the apron of the Mighty Mother whenever he had an ache in his finger or got a bruise in the tussle for existence." It is visible that the poetic occasion that was most after his own heart was the storm and stress of the civil war. He vibrated in this long tension more deeply than in any other experience. It was the time that kindled his steadiest fire, prompted his noblest verse, and gave him what he relished most, a ground for high assurance, a sense of being sturdily in the right and having something to stand up for. He never feared and never shirked the obligation to be positive. Firm and liberal critic as he was, and with nothing of party spirit in his utterance, save in the sense that his sincerity was his party, his mind had little affinity with superfine estimates and shades and tints of opinion; when he felt at all he felt altogether was always on the same side as his likings and loyalties. He had no experimental sympathies, and no part of him was traitor to the rest.

This temper drove the principle of subtlety in his intelligence, which is the need of the last refinement, to take refuge in one particular and I must add very spacious corner, where indeed it

was capable of the widest expansion. The thing he loved most in the world after his country was the English tongue, of which he was an infallible master, and his devotion to which was in fact a sort of agent in his patriotism. The two passions, at any rate, were closely connected, and I will not pretend to have determined whether the western republic was dear to him because he held that it was a magnificent field for the language, or whether the language was dear to him because it had felt the impact of Massachusetts. He himself was not unhappily responsible for a large part of the latter occurrence. His linguistic sense is perhaps the thing his reputation may best be trusted to rest upon -I mean, of course, in its large outcome of style. There is a high strain of originality in it, for it is difficult to recall a writer of our day in whom the handling of words has been at once such an art and such a science. Mr. Lowell's generous temperament seems to triumph in one quarter, here, while his educated patience triumphs in the other. When a man loves words singly, he is apt not to care for them in an order, just as a yery great painter may be quite indifferent to the chemical composition of his colors. But Mr. Lowell was both chemist and artist; the only wonder was that with so many theories about language he should have had so much lucidity left for practice. He used it both as an antiquarian and a lover of life, and was a capital instance of the possible harmony between imagination and knowledgea living proof that the letter does not necessarily kill.

His work represents this reconciled opposition, referable as it is half to the critic and half to the poet. If either half suffers just a little, it is perhaps, in places, his poetry, a part of which is I know not what to say but too literary, more the result of an interest in the general form than of the stirred emotion. One feels at moments that he