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INDEX 453

PAGE

From the painting by Mrs. Anna Lea Merritt.

FACSIMILE OF THE SOWER 64

ELMWOOD 120

From a photograph.

MR. LOWELL IN HIS STUDY 186

From a photograph.

MRS. FRANCES DUNLAP LOWELL 318

From a crayon by S. W. Rowse.

THE HALL AT ELMWOOD 394

From a photograph.

JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL

LOWELL AND THE WAR FOR THE UNION

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.

"Looking at the administration of Mr. Buchanan," he begins, "from the point of view of enlightened statesmanship" , "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. 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 had the incisiveness of brilliant newspaper work, and a breadth not to be looked for in a newspaper. "Phillips 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.

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, 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."

"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 re?stablishment 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."

"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."

"larger manhood, saved for those That walk unblenching through the trial-fires."

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. 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."

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 , 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

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."

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."

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 "Memoriae 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 I am inclined to think clever. But there was nothing wiser than Horace's ninth year--only it overwhelms us like a ninth wave , 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, 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!"

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