462 



LOWELL, JAMES RUSSELL. 



we reflect that it was through the manliness, the pa- 

 tience, the religious fortitude of the splendid victim 

 that the tie of human brotherhood was thrilled to a 

 consciousness of its sacred function. . . . The emula- 

 tion of examples like his makes nations great, and 

 keeps them so. The soil out of which such men as 

 he are made is good to be born on, good to live on. 

 good to die for and to be buried in. 



In the same year, in a speech at the meeting 

 in Westminster Abbey in commemoration of 

 Dean Stanley, he said : 



I feel especially happy, because it seems to me that 

 my presence here is an augury of that day, which 

 may be distant, but which I believe will surely come, 

 when the character and services of every eminent 

 man of the British race in every land, under what- 

 ever distant skies he may have been born, shall be 

 the common possession and the common inheritance, 

 and the common pride of every branch which is 

 sprung from our ancestral stem. 



In an address, en titled "Democracy," delivered 

 on the occasion of assuming the presidency of 

 the Birmingham and Midland Institute, in 1884, 

 he said : 



I have hinted .that what people are afraid of in 

 democracy is less the thing itself than what they con- 

 ceive to be its necessary adjuncts and consequences. 

 It is supposed to reduce all mankind to a dead level 

 of mediocrity in character and culture: to vulgarize 

 men's conceptions of life, and therefore their code of 

 morals, manners, and conduct ; to endanger tne rights 

 of property and possession. But I believe that the 

 real gravamen of the charge lies in the habit it has of 

 making itself generally disagreeable by asking the 

 powers that be, at the most inconvenient moment, 

 whether they are the powers that ought to be. If the 

 powers that be are in a condition to give a satisfactory 

 answer to this inevitable question, they need feel in 

 no way discomfited by it. . . . An appeal to the reason 

 of the people has never been known to fail in the 

 long run. . . . There is more rough-and-tumble in 

 the American democracy than is altogether agreeable 

 to people of sensitive nerves and refined habits, and 

 the people take their political duties lightly and 

 laughingly, as is, perhapSj neither unnatural nor un- 

 becoming in a young giant. Democracies can no 

 more jump away from their own shadows than the 

 rest of us can. . . . But democracies have likewise 

 their finer instincts. . . . Institutions that could bear 

 and breed such men as Lincoln and Emerson had 

 surely more energy for good. No, amid all the fruit- 

 less turmoil and miscarriage of the world, if there be 

 one thing steadfast and of favorable omen, one tiling 

 to make^optimism distrust its own obscure distrust, it 

 is the noted instinct in men to admire what is better 

 and more beautiful than themselves. 



Of great interest is the address, read before the 

 Edinburgh Philosophical Society, on Shakes- 

 peare's Richard III. In the opening paragragh 

 Mr. Lowell says : 



Horace Walpole wrote " Historic Doubts " concern- 

 ing the monarch himself, and I shall take leave to ex- 

 press some about the authorship of the drama that 

 bears his name. . . . There are three special consid- 

 erations, three eminent and singular qualities of 

 Shakespeare, which more than all, or anything else, I 

 think, set him in a different category from his con- 

 temporaries ; and it is these that I would apply as 

 tests. The first ... is his incomparable force and 

 delicacy of poetic expression. . . . One of the surest 

 of these detective clews is this continual cropping- 

 up of philosophical or metaphysical thought in the 

 midst of picturesque imagery or passionate emotion, 

 as if born of the very ecstasy of the language in 

 which it is uttered. The second characteristic, of 

 which I should expect to see some adumbration, at 



least . . . would be humor. ... I mean in the 

 power of pervading a character with humor, creating 

 it out of humor, so to speak, and yet never overstep- 

 ping the limits of nature or coarsening into carica- 

 ture. A third characteristic of Shakespeare is elo- 

 quence, ... an eloquence of impassioned thought 

 finding vent in vivid imagery. Of each and all of 

 these we find less in " Kichard III," as it appears 

 to me, than in any other of his plays of equal preten- 

 sion. ... It seems to me that an examination of 

 " Kichard III " plainly indicates that it is a play which 

 Shakespeare adapted to the stage, making additions, 

 sometimes longer and sometimes shorter, and that, 

 toward the end, either growing weary of his work or 

 pressed for time, he left the older author, whoever he 

 was, pretty well to himself. 



Mr. Lowell delivered noteworthy addresses on 

 the unveiling of a bust of Coleridge, on the un- 

 veiling of a bust of Fielding, on being made 

 President of the Wordsworth Society, and on the 

 dedication of a library in Chelsea. His wife had 

 become an invalid, and in February. 1885, she 

 died. In the same year he was recalled from the 

 mission by President Cleveland. He had been 

 honored with the degree of D. C. L. by the Uni- 

 versity of Oxford, and that of LL. D. by Cam- 

 bridge, and he was elected rector of the Univer- 

 sity of St. Andrews. After his return he resumed 

 his lectures at Harvard. His home was with his 

 only child, Mrs. Edward Burnett, at Southbor- 

 ough, Mass. His feelings when he returned to 

 his country can be read in the postscript to some 

 lines written to his life-long friend. George Will- 

 iam Curtis : 



Home am I come: not, as I hoped might be, 

 To the old haunts, too full of ghosts for me, 

 But to the olden dreams that time endears, 

 And the loved books that younger grow with years ; 

 To country rambles, timing with my tread 

 Some happier verse that carols in my head, 

 Yet all with sense of something vainly mist, 

 Of something lost, but when I never wist. 

 How empty seems to me the populous street, 

 One figure gone I daily loved to meet, 

 The clear, sweet singer with the crown of snow 

 Not whiter than the'thoughts that housed below ! 

 And, ah, what absence feel I at my side, 

 Like Dante when he missed his laureled guide, 

 What sense of diminution in the air 

 Once so inspiring, Emerson not there ! 

 But life is sweet, though all that makes it sweet 

 Lessen like sound of friends' departing feet, 

 And death is beautiful as feet of friend 

 Coming with welcome at our journey's end ; 

 For me Fate gave, whate'er she else "denied, 

 A pature sloping to the southern side ; 

 I thank her for it, though when clouds arise 

 Such natures double-darken gloomy skies. 

 I muse upon the margin of the sea, 

 Our common pathway to the new To Be, 

 Watching the sails that lessen more and more, 

 Of good and beautiful embarked before : 

 With bits of wreck I patch the boat shall bear 

 Me to that unexhausted Otherwhere, 

 Whose friendly-peopled shore I sometimes see, 

 By soft mirage uplifted, beckon me, 

 Nor sadly hear, as lower sinks the sun, 

 My moorings to the past snap one by one. 



, Mr. Lowell's first public address after his re- 

 turn was delivered at Harvard College, on the 

 two hundred and fiftieth anniversary of its found- 

 ing. It is an especially interesting utterance to 

 those who would study and follow the mental 

 and spiritual life of our American poet. It re- 

 veals his love of letters, his attainments in them, 

 his patriotism, his love of the institutions and 



