mensely fortunate in reflecting an extraordinary personality takes its place with the few great elegies in our language, gives a hand to Lycidas and to Thyrsis.

I may not go into detail, or I should speak of twenty other things, especially of the mellow, witty wisdom of The Cathedral, and of the infinite, intricate delicacy of Endymion more tremulous, more penetrating, than any other of the author's poetic productions, I think, and exceptionally fine in surface. As for The Biglow Papers, they seem to me, in regard to Mr. Lowell, not so much produced as productive - productive of a clear, delightful image of the temper and nature of the man. One says of them, not that they are by him, but that they are his very self-full of his opinions and perceptions, his humor and his wit, his character, his experience, his talk, and his intense consciousness of race. They testify to many things, but most of all to the thing I have last named; and it may seem to those whose observation of the author was most complete during the concluding years of his life that they could testify to nothing more characteristic. If he was inveterately, in England and on the Continent, the American abroad (though jealous indeed of the liberty to be at home even there), so the lucubrations of Parson Wilbur and his contributors are an unsurpassably deliberate exhibition of the primitive home-quality. I may seem to be going far when I say that they constitute to my sense the author's most literary production; they illustrate, at any rate, his inexhaustible interest in the question of style and his extraordinary acuteness in dealing with it. They are a wonderful study of style - by which I mean of organized expression — and nothing could be more significant than the fact that he should have put his finest faculty for linguis tics at the service of the Yankee character.

He knew more, I think, about the rustic American speech than all others together who have known anything of it, so much more closely, justly, and sympathetically had he noted it. He honored it with the strongest scientific interest, and indeed he may well have been on terms of reciprocity with a dialect that had enabled him to produce a masterpiece. The only drawback I can imagine to a just complacency in this transaction would have been the sense that the people are few, after all, who can measure the minute perfection of the success a success not only of swift insight, but of patient observation. Mr. Lowell was as capable of patience in illustrating New England idiosyncrasies as he was capable of impatience. He never forgot, at any rate, that he stood for all such things stood for them particularly during the years he spent in England; and his attitude was made up of many curious and complicated and admirable elements. He was so proud

not for himself, but for his country — that he felt the need of a kind of official version of everything that in other quarters might be judged anomalous there. Theoretically he cared little for the judg ment of other quarters, and he was always amused—the good-natured British Lion in person could not have been more so at "well-meaning" compli ment or commendation; it required, it must be admitted, more tact than is usually current to incur the visitation of neither the sharper nor the sunnier form of his irony. But in fact the national consciousness was too acute in him for slumber at his post, and he paid, in a certain restlessness, the penalty of his imagination, of the fatal sense of perspective and the terrible faculty of comparison. It would have been intolerable to him, moreover, to be an empirical American, and he had organized his loyalty with a thoroughness of which his admirable wit was an efficient messenger. He never anticipated attack, thought

it would be a meagre account of his attitude to say it was defensive; but he took appreciation for granted, and eased the way for it with reasons that were cleverer in nothing than in appearing casual. These reasons were innumerable, but they were all the reasons of a lover. It was not simply that he loved his country - he was literally in love with it.

If there be two kinds of patriotism, the latent and the patent, his kind was essentially the latter. Some people for whom the world is various and universal, and who dread nothing so much as seeing it cornered, regard this particular sentiment as a purely practical one, a prescription of duty in a given case, like a knack with the coiled hose when the house is on fire, or the plunge of the swimmer when a man is overboard. They grudge it a place in the foreground of the spirit - they consider that it shuts out the view. Others find it constantly comfortable and perpetually fresh - find, as it were, the case al ways given; for them the immediate view is the view and the very atmosphere of the mind, so that it is not a question only of performance, but of contemplation as well. Mr. Lowell's horizon was too wide to be curtained out, and his intellectual curiosity such as to have effectually prevented his shutting himself up in his birth chamber; but if the local idea never kept his intelligence at home, he solved the difficulty by at least never going forth without it. When he quitted the hearth it was with the household god in his hand, and as he delighted in Europe it was to Europe that he took it. Never had a household god such a magnificent outing, nor was made free of so many strange rites and climes; never, in short, had any patriotism such a liberal airing. If, however, Mr. Lowell was loath to admit that the American order could have an infirmity, I think it was because it would have cost him so much to ac

knowledge that it could have communicated one to an object that he cherished as he cherished the English tongue. That was the innermost atmosphere of his mind, and he never could have afforded, on this general question, any policy but a policy of annexation. He was capable of convictions in the light of which it was clear that the language he wrote so admirably had encountered in the United States not corruption, but conservation. Any conviction of his on this subject was a contribution to science, and he was zealous to show that the speech of New England was most largely that of an older and more vernacular England than the England that to-day finds it queer. He was capable of writing perfect American to bring out this archaic element. He kept in general the two tongues apart, save in so far as his English style betrayed a connection by a certain American tact in the art of leaving out. He was perhaps sometimes slightly paradoxical in the contention that the language had incurred no peril in its western adventures; this is the sense in which I meant just now that he occasionally crossed the line. The difficulty was not that his vision of pure English could not fail in America sometimes to be clouded the peril was for his vision of pure American. of pure American. His standard was the highest, and the wish was often, no doubt, father to the thought. The Biglow Papers are delightful, but nothing could be less like The Biglow Papers than the style of the American newspaper. He lent his wit to his theories, but one or two of them lived on him like unthrifty sons.

None the less it was impossible to be witness of his general action during his residence in England without feeling that, not only by the particular things he did, but by the general thing he was, he contributed to a large ideal of peace. We certainly owe to him (and by "we I mean both countries- he made that

plural elastic) a mitigation of danger. There is always danger between country and country, and danger in small and shameful forms as well as big and inspiring ones; but the danger is less and the dream of peace more rosy when they have been beguiled into a common admiration. A common aversion even will do the essential thing is the disposition to share. The poet, the writer, the speaker, ministers to this community; he is Orpheus with his lute—the lute that pacifies the great stupid beasts of international prejudice; so that if a quarrel takes place over the piping form of the loved of Apollo it is as if he were rent again by the Mænads. It was a charm to the observant mind to see how Mr. Lowell kept the Mænads in their place — a work admirably continued by his successor in office, who had, indeed, under his roof, an inestimable assistant in the process. Mr. Phelps was not, as I may say, single-handed; which was his predecessor's case even for some time prior to an irreparable bereavement. The prying Furies, at any rate, during these years, were effectually snubbed, and will, it is to be hoped, never again hold their snaky heads very high. The spell that worked upon them was simply the voice of civilization, and Mr. Lowell's advantage was that he happened to find himself in a supremely good place for producing it. He produced it both consciously and unconsciously, both officially and privately, from principle and from instinct, in the hundred spots, on the thousand occasions, which it is one of the happiest idiosyncrasies of English life to supply; and since I have spoken so distinctly of his patriotism, I must add that after all he exercised the virtue most in this particular way. His new friends liked him because he was at once so fresh and so ripe, and this was predominantly what he understood by being a good American. It was by being one in this sense that he broke the heart of the Furies.

The combination made a quality which pervaded his whole intellectual character; for the quality of his diplomatic action, of his public speeches, of his talk, of his influence, was simply the genius that we had always appreciated in his critical writings. The hours and places with which he had to deal were not equally inspiring; there was, inevi tably, colorless company, there were dull dinners, influences prosaic and functions mechanical; but he was, substantially, always the messenger of the Muses, and of that particular combination of them which had permitted him to include a tenth in their number- the infallible sister to whom humor is dear. I mean that the man and the author, in him, were singularly convertible; it was what made the author so vivid. It was also what made that voice of civilization to whose harmony I have alluded practically the same thing as the voice of literature. Mr. Lowell's style was an indefeasible part of him, as his correspondence, if it be ever published, will copiously show; it was in all relations his natural channel of communication. This is why, at the opening of this paper, I ventured to speak of his happy exercise of a great opportunity as at bottom the revanche of letters. This, at any rate, the literary observer was free to see in it; such an observer made a cross against the day, as an anniversary for form, and an anniversary the more memorable that form, when put to tests that might have been called severe, was so far from being found wanting in substance, met the occasion in fact so completely. I do not pretend that during Mr. Lowell's residence in England the public which he found constituted there spent most of its time in reading his essays; I only mean that the faculty it relished in him most was the faculty most preserved for us in his volumes of criticism.

It is not an accident that I do not linger over the contents of these vol

umes this has not been a part of my undertaking. They will not go out of fashion, they will keep their place and hold their own; for they are full of broad-based judgment, and of those stamped sentences of which we are as naturally retentive as of gold and silver coin. Reading them over lately in large portions, I was struck not only with the "good things" that abound in them, but with the soundness and fullness of their inspiration. It is intensely the air of letters, but it is like that of some temperate and restorative clime. I judge them perhaps with extravagant fondness, for I am attached to the class to which they belong; I like such an atmosphere, I like the living fragrance of the book-room. In turning over Mr. Lowell's critical pages, I seem to hear the door close softly behind me, and to see in the shaded lamplight one of the sweetest chances that life gives us of being happy. I see an apartment brown and book-lined, which is the place in the world most convertible into fairyland. The turning of the leaves and the crackling of the fire are the only things that break its stillness—the stillness in which mild miracles are wrought. These are the miracles of evocation, of resurrection, of transmission, of insight, of history, of poetry. It may be a little room, but it is a great world; it may be a deep solitude, but it is a mighty company. In this critical chamber of Mr. Lowell's there is a charm, to my sense, in knowing what is outside of the closed door-it intensifies both the isolation and the experience. The big new western order is outside, and yet within all seems as immemorial as Persia. It is like a little lighted cabin, full of the ingenuities of home, in the gray of a great ocean. Such ingenuities of home are what represent, in Mr. Lowell's case, the conservatism of the author. His home was the receding past it was there that his taste was at ease. From what quarter his disciples in the United

States will draw their sustenance it is too soon to say; the question will be better answered when we have the disciples more clearly in our eye. We seem already, however, to distinguish the quarter from which they will not draw it. Few of them, as yet, appear to have in their hand, or rather in their head, any such treasure of knowledge.

It was when his lifetime was longest that the fruit of culture was finest in him and that his wit was most profuse. In the admirable address on Democracy that he pronounced at Birmingham in 1884, in the beautiful speech on the Harvard anniversary of 1886, everything is so supremely well said that we seem to be reading some consecrated masterpiece; they represent, in the highest perfection, the maturity of a masterly talent. There are places where he seems in a sort of mystical communication with the richest sources of English prose. "But this imputed and vicarious longevity, though it may be obscurely operative in our lives and fortunes, is no valid offset for the shortness of our days, nor widens by a hair's breadth the horizon of our memories." He sounds like a younger brother of Bacon and of Milton, either of whom, for instance, could not have uttered a statelier word on the subject of the relinquishment of the required study of Greek than that "oblivion looks in the face of the Grecian Muse only to forget her errand." On the other hand, in the address delivered in 1884 before the English Wordsworth Society, he sounds like no one but his inveterately felicitous self. In certain cases, Wordsworth, like Elias the prophet, "stands up as fire and his word burns like a lamp.' But too often, when left to his own resources and to the conscientious performance of the duty laid upon him to be a great poet quand même, he seems diligently intent on producing fire by the primitive method of rubbing the dry sticks of his blank verse one against the other,

while we stand in shivering expectation of the flame that never comes." It would be difficult to express better the curious evening chill of the author of The Excursion, which is so like the conscious mistake of camping out in au

tumn.

It was an extreme satisfaction to the very many persons in England who valned Mr. Lowell's society that the termination of his official mission there proved not the termination of the episode. He came back for his friends - he would have done anything for his friends. He also, I surmise, came back somewhat for himself, inasmuch as he entertained an affection for London which he had no reason for concealing. For several successive years he reappeared there with the brightening months, and I am not sure that this ir responsible and less rigorously sociable period did not give him his justest impressions. It surrendered him, at any rate, more completely to his friends and to several close and particularly valued ties. He felt that he had earned the right to a few frank predilections. English life is a big pictured story-book, and he could dip into the volume where he liked. It was altogether delightful to turn some of the pages with him, and especially to pause for the marginal commentary in finer type, some of it the model of the illuminating footnote over the massive chapter of London.

It is very possible not to feel the charm of London at all; the foreigner indeed who does so is a very rare bird. It marks the comparative community of the two big branches of the English race that of all aliens Americans are most susceptible to this many-voiced appeal. They are capable of loving the capital of their race almost with passion, which for the most part is the way it is loved when it is not hated. The sentiment was strong in Mr. Lowell; a part of the spirit of his maturity (or shall I say VOL. LXIX. NO. 411.

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of his youth?) was lodged here, and at the end he came back every year to feel the touch of it. He gave himself English summers, and if some people should say that the gift was scarcely liberal, others, who met him on this ground, will reply that such seasons drew from him, in the circle of friendship, a radiance not inherent in their complexion. This association became a feature of the London May and June - it held its own even in the rank confusion of July. It pervaded the quarter he repeatedly inhabited, where a commonplace little house, in the neighborhood of the Paddington station, will long wear in its narrow front, to the inner sense of many passers, a mystical gold-lettered tablet. Here he came and went, during several months, for such and such a succession of years; here one could find him at home in the late afternoon, in his lengthened chair, with his cherished pipe and his table piled high with books. Here he practiced little jesting hospitalities. for he was irrepressibly and amusingly hospitable. Whatever he was in his latest time, it was, even in muffled miseries of gout, with a mastery of laughter and forgetfulness. Nothing amused him more than for people to dine with him, and few things, certainly, amused them as much. His youth came back to him not once for all, but twenty times for every occasion. He was certainly the most boyish of learned doctors.

This was always particularly striking during the several weeks of August and September that he had formed the habit of spending at Whitby, on the Yorkshire coast. It was here, I think, that he was most naturally at his ease, most humorously evaded the hard bargain of Time. The place is admirable — an old red-roofed fishing-town, in one of the indentations of a high, brave coast, with the ruins of a great abbey just above it, an expanse of purple moor behind, and a convenient extension in the way of an informal little modern watering-place.