652 AUGUSTUS LOWELL. 



in Mr. Lowell's case it was as if he were but the mouthpiece of the idea, 

 so heartily did he identify himself with it, and yet so single was his intent. 

 It was the idea he thought of, not of himself. Such a condition tends in 

 a twofold way to conviction ; first, by the sincerity of the pleading, and 

 secondly, by the absence so far as is humanly possible, of the antagonism 

 roused by personality. 



Recognition of his ability followed any knowledge of him ; it did not, 

 as with some men, precede it. Those qualities compounded of sociability 

 and forth-puttingness, however unintentional, which make for instant dis- 

 tinction among one's fellows, were not his by nature. His abilities were 

 solid, not showy. Nor was it his bent to go out of his way in the road 

 we all travel to make a new path. He neither courted position nor 

 shirked it. When it once fell to him he became as it were the office. 

 Nothing was ever done by him for his own sake, however incidentally. 

 He seemed simply to embody his trust. In intent he was singularly 

 single. Indeed, in describing his action I find it difficult to convey the 

 combination of self-obliteration and of self-sufficiency in its best sense, 

 which he was. For the character is uncommon. One often witnesses 

 self-abnegation. But it is usually wedded to weakness. Or, on the other 

 hand, one sees strength associated with self-seeking. Few men are essen- 

 tially impersonal enough to strive strenuously for the thing in itself, as if 

 it were a person. He did. 



This was perhaps the stranger that his mental makeup was not of the 

 abstract but of the distinctly concrete kind. In practical, not in theoreti- 

 cal matters, he was great. Widely read as he was he never seemed to 

 care to theorize. He enjoyed highly the theories of others, when they 

 did not collide with the puritanism which, as I have said, he inherited 

 doubly distilled. Even this was perhaps as much due to the society in 

 which he had been brought up. He was educated before the modern 

 movement in thought took place, and Boston of sixty years ago was even 

 behind the rest of the world in this stirring of the waters of stagnation. 

 Not in knowledge nor in intellect ; it was in cast of mind he differed. His 

 preference W*as for action. Of this he never tired. To recreation he was 

 less {riven. Such as he took was of a serious kind. He was a member 

 of the Wednesday Evening Club, of the Thursday Evening Club, and of 

 a class dinner club ; but clubs which consist but of a local habitation and 

 a name he never cared to join. Loafing and he were strangers. 



Will and the power of representation were, as I have said, two of his 

 attributes. But the second of these should, though it often does not, 

 include a quality which is itself fundamental to all character, and which 



