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LOWELL, JAMES RUSSELL. 



tribute to the dead and the living among her 

 graduates and students who had gone forth to 

 the war. Other famous elegies in the English 

 language are, of general ones, Gray's_ " Elegy in 

 a Country '"'kniw.liiTaTvl " nnrl Rrvnt.*s "Th:i.nR- 



topsis"; of personal ones, Milton's " Lycidas," 

 Shelley's " Adonais," and Tennyson's "In Me- 

 rnoriam " and " Ode on Wellington." None of 

 these, taken as a whole, outranks Lowell's. Some 

 are more musical in parts, but not one is more 

 musical in all parts, not one grander in thought, 

 tenderer in feeling, more moving in pathos, and 

 certainly not one can compare with it in nobil- 

 ity of theme. One stanza of it reads: 



Many loved Truth, and lavished life's best oil 



Amid the dust of books to find her, 

 Content at last, for guerdon of their toil, 



With the cast mantle she hath left behind her. 



Many in sad fate sought for her, 



Many with crossed hands sighed for her ; 



But these, our brothers, fought for her, 



At life's dear peril wrought for her, 



So loved her that they died for her, 



Tasting the raptured fleetness 



Of her 'divine completeness. 



The closing stanza reads : 



Bow down, dear Land, for thou hast found release ! 



Thy God, in these distempered days, 



Hath taught thee the sure wisdom of his ways, 

 And through thine enemies hath wrought thy peace. 



Bow down in prayer and praise ! 

 No poorest in thy borders but may now 

 Lift to the juster skies a. man's enfranchised brow. 

 O Beautiful ! my Country ! ours once more 1 

 Smoothing thy gold of war-disheveled hair 

 O'er such sweet orows as never other wore, 



And letting thy set lips, 



Freed from" wrath's pale eclipse, 

 The rosy edges of their smile lay bare, 

 What w'ords divine of lover or of poet 

 Could tell our love and make thee know it, 

 Among the nations bright beyond compare ? 



What were our lives without thee ? 



What all our lives to save thee ? 



We reck not what we gave thee ; 



We will not dare to doubt thee, 

 But ask whatever else, and we will dare ! 



" The Cathedral " was written in 1869. It has 

 the long-lined monotony which is the one draw- 

 back to Lowell's verse, but it is the master's 

 work. The following lines represent it fairly : 



Man can not be God's outlaw if he would, 

 Nor so abscond him in the caves of sense 

 But Nature still shall search some crevice out 

 With messages of splendor from that source 

 Which, dive he, soar he, baffles still and lures. 

 This life were brutish did we not sometimes 

 Have intimation clear of wider scope, 

 Hints of occasion infinite, to keep 

 The soul alert with noble discontent 

 And onward yearnings of unstilled desire ; 

 Fruitless, except we now and then divined 

 A mystery of purpose gleaming through 

 The secular confusions of the world, 

 Whose will we darkly accomplish, doing ours. 

 No man can think nor in himself perceive, 

 Sometimes at waking, in the street sometimes, 

 Or on the hillside, always unfprewarned, 

 A grace of being, finer than himself, 

 That beckons and is g_one a larger life 

 Upon his own impinging, with swift glimpse 

 Of spacious circles luminous with mind, 

 To which the ethereal substance of his own 

 Seems but gross clouxi to make that visible, 

 Touched to a sudden glory round the edge. 



Who that hath known these visitations fleet 

 Would strive to make them trite and ritual ? 

 I, that still pray at morning and at eve, 

 Loving those roots that feed us from the past, 

 And prizing more than Plato things I learned 

 At that best Academe, a mother's knee, 

 Thrice in my life, perhaps, have truly prayed, 

 Thrice, stirred below my conscious self, have felt 

 That perfect disenthrallment which is God ; 

 Nor know I which to hold worst enemy, 

 Him who on speculation's windy waste 

 Would turn me loose, stnpt ot the raiment warm 

 By faith contrived against our nakedness, 

 Or him who, cruel-kind, would fain obscure. 

 With pictured saints and paraphrase of God, 

 The soul's east window of divine surprise. 



This poem is Lowell's contribution to the reli- 

 gious controversies of his day, and it suggests a 

 quality in his work, both in verse and prose. 

 His life history and thought can be traced 

 through his writings to an unuusal degree. 

 Whether he writes directly of principles or di- 

 rectly of particular men. the discussions arc 

 always really of ideas, and his own reach and 

 progress of conviction can be traced. 



In this year (1869) Lowell wrote also two char- 

 acteristic essays, one of which, " On a Certain Con- 

 descension in Foreigners," is perhaps the most 

 popular of his writings. The other is " My Gar- 

 den Acquaintance," which embodies his love for 

 nature in his own quaint fashion. In closing it, 

 he writes : 



There is something inexpressibly dear to me in 

 these old friendships of a lifetime. "There is scarce a 

 tree of mine but has had, at some time or other, a 

 happy homestead among its boughs, and to which 1 

 can not say : 



" Many light hearts and wings, 

 Which now be dead, lodged in thy living bowers." 



My walk under the pines would lose half its summer 

 charm were I to miss that shy anchorite, the Wilson's 

 thrush, nor hear in haying time the metallic ring 

 of his song that justifies his rustic name of scythe- 

 whet. I protect my game as jealously as an English 

 squire. If anybody had oologized a certain cuckoo's 

 nest 1 know of, it would have left me a sore place in 

 my mind for weeks. ... I would not if I could con- 

 vert them from their pretty pagan ways. 



In the opening of the other essay there is a 

 lovely picture of twilight quiet and the charm of 

 association : 



All things combined in a result as near absolute 

 peace as can be hoped for by a man who knows that 

 there is a writ out against 'him in the hands of the 

 printer's devil. ... I love old ways, and the path 1 was 

 walking felt kindly to the feet it had known for almost 

 fifty years. . . . How many times 1 had lingered to 

 study the shadows of the leaves mezzotinted upon 

 the turf that edged it by the moon, of the hare boughs 

 etched with a touch beyond Kembrandt by the same 

 unconscious artist on the smooth page of snow. . . . 

 " Blessed old fields!" I was just exclaiming to myself, 

 when I was interrupted by a voice which asked me 

 in German whether I was the Herr Professor, Doctor, 

 so and so ? 



One feels so intimately assured that one is made up 

 ,in part of shreds and leavings of the past, in part of the 

 interpolations of other people, that an honest man 

 would be slow in sayiiig yes to such a question. I 

 had begun life with the theory of giving something 

 to every beggar that came along. ... I was but too 

 conscious of a vagrant fiber in myself which often 

 thrilled me in my solitary walks with a temptation to 

 wander on into infinite space. . . . For seven years 1 

 helped maintain one heroic man on an imaginary 



