LOWELL AS A PUBLIC SPEAKER
It will be as well to bring into one chapter such references to
Lowell’s work as a public speaker as may give some idea of the interest
with which he was always heard, and, indeed, of his own evident
enjoyment of the position of an orator.
He spoke with absolute simplicity, with entire ease, and he really
enjoyed public speaking.
It was near the close of the first quarter of the century that what was
called the “lyceum system” came into being in New England. It worked
wonderfully well under the original plans. The institution, as it may
be called, or the habit, if you please, of lecturing and listening to
lectures, was formed again, probably never to be abandoned in our
communities. The method by which this was done in the New England towns
worked well for a generation. And Lowell, as a youngster starting on
life, made some of his first addresses “under the auspices” of the
old-fashioned lyceum committees.
I am rather fond of saying, what nobody seems to care for excepting
myself, that high among the causes which sent Winthrop’s colony to
Massachusetts was the passion of such men as he to hear lectures on
week-days. Now this was important. It means that the contest between
the “left wing” and the “right wing” in the English Church turned
largely on the wish of the more advanced clergy to speak in other
pulpits than their own, and the greater wish of the Puritan people to
hear them. Of course, if a bishop could shut up a man in his own
pulpit, the influence of one of the Garrisons, or Phillipses, or
Parkers, or Pillsburys of the day would be very much restricted. But so
long as John Cotton could travel over half England, he was much more
formidable to Bishop Laud and the other people who directed the
Establishment than he would have been if he had remained in his own
pulpit in the Lincolnshire Boston.
So there grew up for that generation the habit of a week-day lecture in
the New England meeting-houses; a habit preserved with more or less
interest to the present day. But as time went by, these week-day
lectures, so far as I recollect them, were little more than the
repetition of sermons which had been preached on Sunday. Now, if there
is anything dangerous anywhere for a lecturer’s usefulness, it is a
habit of repeating the average sermon. A sermon is one thing and a
lyceum lecture is another. A lyceum lecture has one purpose, and a
sermon ought to have another purpose. However this may be, the people
of the generations of this century who did not much like to go to the
“Thursday lecture” in Boston, or similar lectures in other towns, were
very glad to hear the best speakers of the time. And they generally
gave them more latitude than was to be found in the creed-bound
churches of the time.
I do not think I stray too far from our central subject if I take a few
lines to speak of the value to the whole Northern community of this
very curious system. To introduce such men as have been named above,
and a hundred other men, some of them of equal prominence in our
history, and all of them of a certain ability as public speakers,—to
introduce such men to the average community of the North, so that it
knew them personally, was in itself a great achievement. To go back to
the comparison which I have made already, these Peter the Hermits,
passing from place to place, preached a crusade. They were in very much
the position of John Cotton and those other Puritan lecturers whom
Bishop Laud and the Star Chamber disliked in England. And the history
of the twenty years before our Civil War is not rightly written unless
it refers to the effect which was wrought by such speakers. Phillips,
Parker, Ward Beecher, and even Garrison, would have been little known
outside a small circle around their respective homes but for this
lecturing practice.
There will be found in Lowell’s letters and in other memoranda of the
time an occasional joke about the external hardships of the thing. He
speaks somewhere of three “committeemen,” with three cold hands like
raw beefsteak, welcoming him and bidding him good-by. But such little
jokes as this must not give a false idea of the reception which was
given to the pioneers of larger thought than that which the hidebound
churches of the time were willing to interpret. For one such story of
the beefsteak hands there could be told a thousand stories of warm
welcomes into charming families, and of immediate mutual recognition of
people of kindred thought who would never have seen each other’s faces
but for the happy appointment which brought one as a lecturer to the
other as “committeeman.” Anything that taught the separated people of
this country that it was a country, that they were citizens of the same
nation, and that they had each other’s burdens to bear, was of great
value in those days. The reader of to-day forgets that in the same
years in which South Carolina was defying the North, Massachusetts gave
directions that the national flag should not float over her State
House. That is to say, in those days there was an intense sensitiveness
which kept men of different sections of the country apart from each
other. Anything which overcame such sensitiveness, and brought real
lovers of their country and lovers of God face to face, was an
advantage. In this case the advantage can hardly be overestimated.
To this hour the popular lecture in America differs from the lecture,
so called, which the Useful Knowledge Society of England, and what they
used to call Mechanics’ Institutes, established there in the earlier
part of the century. Mr. Emerson told me that when he delivered his
lectures in London, intelligent people went back to Coleridge’s morning
lectures, of a dozen or more years before, as a precedent. And you see
in the accounts of Carlyle’s London lectures that it was regarded as a
novelty that anything should be said at a lecture which decently
intelligent people needed to hear. But in October, 1843, Emerson wrote
to his friend John Sterling, “There is now a ‘lyceum,’ so called, in
almost every town in New England, and if I would accept an invitation I
might read a lecture every night.” Sterling had written to him not long
before, “I doubt whether there are anywhere in Britain, except in
London, a hundred persons to be found capable of at all appreciating
what seems to find, as spoken by you, such ready acceptance from
various bodies of learners in America.” Such people meet, in their
moribund feudal fashion, “to encourage the others,” as Sir Walter
Vivian looked on the experiments in his own park, or as Murat charged
at Borodino. The amusing condescension, so often observable in the
English pulpit, is even more marked in the English “popular lecture.”
But, in the beginning, it was not so here. As early as 1814 Jacob
Bigelow had lectured on botany in Boston, and, not long after, Edward
Everett on Greek art and antiquities, and Henry Ware on the Holy Land,
in courses of lectures, which were attended by the very best and most
intelligent people. And when Waldo Emerson, and Theodore Parker, and
Wendell Phillips, and James Lowell lectured in the same region, they
gave the best they could give, and no one thought he condescended in
going to hear.
I do not forget a bright saying of Starr King, one of those best worth
hearing of the brilliant group of traveling lecturers of whom Lowell
was one. King said that a popular lyceum lecture was made of five parts
of sense and five of nonsense. “There are only five men in America,”
said he, “who know how to mix them—and I think I am one of the five.”
Other people thought so too, and did not detect the nonsense. His
carefully wrought lectures are worth anybody’s study to-day.
He is the author of another lyceum chestnut. Some one asked him what
his honorarium was for each lecture. “F.A. M.E.,” said he—“Fifty And My
Expenses.”
Lowell’s hearers got no nonsense. His subjects were generally literary
or critical—I think always so. On one or more expeditions he went to
what was then the Far West—speaking in Wisconsin, I observe, within
twenty years after Black Hawk and Keokuk addressed Americans on the
same fields.
(Ah me! Why did I not accept forty acres of land between the lakes in
Madison, Wisconsin, when they were offered me in 1842? The reader will
perhaps pardon this digression!)
Of such a system of Wanderjähre in the education of a country, not the
least benefit is that which is gained by the speaker. No man knows
America who has not traveled much in her different regions. A wise
United States Senator proposed lately that each newly elected member of
Congress should be compelled to travel up and down his own country for
those mysterious months after his election before he takes his seat.
The men who have had such a privilege do not make the mistakes of
book-trained men.
A good enough illustration of some of the deeper consequences of what
may be called the lyceum movement may be found in the story often told
of the divided committee who met Wendell Phillips in a place where he
was quite a stranger. On his arrival he asked what was the subject he
was to speak on. Should he read his lecture on the Lost Arts, or should
he deliver an address on Anti-Slavery? It proved, alas! that the
committee was equally divided, perhaps bitterly divided, and neither
side would yield to the other. Phillips at once made the determination
with his own prompt wit. He said he would deliver the lecture on the
Lost Arts first, and then the Anti-Slavery address afterwards for any
who wanted to stay and hear. Of course, after they had heard him,
everybody stayed, and so he had the whole town to hear his radical
appeal, where otherwise he would have had only that half the town which
was convinced already.
Under a law which may be called divine, the students, in all colleges
where they had the choice of anniversary orators, always elected the
speakers who, as they thought, would be most disagreeable to the
college government. So Emerson, Parker, and Phillips came to be
favorite college speakers in colleges where the faculties would gladly
have suppressed all knowledge of the men. Mr. Emerson’s address at
Dartmouth in 1838 would never have been delivered but for the action of
this law. This address, when printed, lying on the counter of a
book-shop in Oxford, gave to Gladstone his first knowledge of the New
England Plato.
It is amusing now, and in a way it is pathetic, to see how this
youngster Lowell, even before he was of age, caught at the floating
straw of a Lyceum engagement whenever he could, in the hope of earning
a little money. This was simply that he felt the mortification which
every bright boy feels when, after being told that he is a man by some
college authority, he finds that he is still living in his father’s
house, eating at his father’s table, wearing clothes which his father
pays for, and even asking his father for spending-money. There is a
note from him to Loring to ask if the “Andover Lyceum” will pay as much
as five dollars for a lecture.
The reader must understand that in the “Lyceum system,” so called, it
was considered as a sort of duty for educated men to have on hand a
lecture or two which they were willing to read to any audience which
was willing to ask them. This was, by the way, in precise fulfillment
of that somewhat vague commission which constitutes the degree of a
Master of Arts. The person who is fortunate enough to receive this
diploma is told that he has the privilege of “speaking in public as
often as any one asks him to do so.” This is my free translation of
“publice profitendi.” Those words never really meant “public
profession.” In our modern days we are a little apt to take this
privilege without the permission of the university.
Educated men accepted such appointments as their contribution to public
education. It was just as the same men served on the school committee
or board of selectmen, and would have been insulted if anybody had
proposed to pay them anything for doing it. In many cases, perhaps in
most cases, no tickets were bought or sold. The selectmen gave the Town
Hall for a lyceum, or the First Parish gave the use of its
meeting-house for a lyceum, as they would have done for a temperance
meeting or a missionary meeting. But, of course, it soon appeared that
if the audiences were to have continuous courses of lectures, somebody
must be paid for them, and somebody must pay. College professors were
engaged to give elementary courses on scientific or historical
subjects. As early as 1832 Mr. Emerson delivered a course of
biographical lectures at the request of the Massachusetts Society for
Diffusing Useful Knowledge. And in the years of the 30’s in Boston
there were maintained through the winter public courses almost every
evening in the week, by at least five different organizations—the
Society for Diffusing Useful Knowledge, the Boston Lyceum, the
Mercantile Library Association, the Mechanics’ Association, and
sometimes the Historical Society. For all these courses tickets were
sold at low rates, but for enough to enable the societies to pay the
lecturers a small honorarium. From such arrangements as these the
custom spread of recompensing the lecturer for his work; and at this
moment, in an average New England town, people will not go to a lecture
if they think the lecturer has “given” his service. The public thinks
that if not worth pay, it is not worth hearing.
In this arrangement of the lyceum, Lowell found his place before he was
of age. He was always an easy and a ready speaker, and, as I have said,
he enjoyed public speaking. Before long, his interest in the temperance
reform and the anti-slavery reform brought him occasionally on the
platform. He spoke with perfect ease. On such occasions he spoke
without notes, never speaking without knowing what he had to say, and
always saying it. But I think he never delivered a lecture, as he would
have called it, without a manuscript written out in full.
The first account he gives of his public speaking is that of the
celebration of the Cambridgeport Women’s Total Abstinence Society on
the Fourth of July, 1842. “There were more than three thousand in all,
it was said. I was called out, and made a speech of about ten minutes,
from the top of a bench, to an audience of two thousand, as silent as
could be. I spoke of the beauty of having women present, and of their
influence and interest in reforms. I ended with the following
sentiment: ‘The proper place of woman—at the head of the pilgrims back
to purity and truth.’ In the midst of my speech I heard many
demonstrations of satisfaction and approval—one voice saying, ‘Good!’
in quite an audible tone. I was told that my remarks were ‘just the
thing.’ When I got up and saw the crowd, it inspired me. I felt as calm
as I do now, and could have spoken an hour with ease. I did not
hesitate for a word or expression even once.“
Alas! the Boston papers of the day had Mr. Tyler’s “third veto” to
print, and the news from England by a late arrival; and no word could
be spared for poor James’s first essay. What saith the Vulgate? “Nullum
prophetam in actis diurnis honorari.”
As it proved, he was brought face to face with large numbers of persons
who would otherwise never have seen him, by delivering lectures in
various courses through the Northern and Northwestern States; but this
did not begin until a period as late as 1855. What I have said of his
easy speaking is the remark of a person who heard him, as I have often
heard him. I never spoke with any one who had heard him who did not say
the same thing. But he himself did not always feel the sort of
confidence in his power in this way which would have seemed natural. I
am told by many persons who had to introduce him upon such occasions,
that he would be doubtful and anxious about his power with an audience
before he began. And he was excessively sensitive about any accident by
which he forgot a word or in any way seemed to himself to have tripped
in his discourse.
In 1853 he was invited to deliver a course of lectures before the
Lowell Institute. These lectures were eventually delivered in January
and February of 1855.
[Illustration:
JOHN LOWELL, JR.
_From a painting by Chester Harding, in the possession of Augustus
Lowell, Boston_]
Because the great system of public instruction which is carried on by
this Institute bears the name of his family, I will give some little
account of it here. Stimulated by the success of what we have been
speaking of, the lyceum system of the Northern States, John Lowell,
Jr., a cousin of James Russell Lowell, had founded this Institute. His
wife and all his children had died. His own health was delicate, and he
undertook a long journey abroad. While in Egypt he made his will, in
which he left $250,000 for the beginning of a fund for carrying on
public instruction by means of lectures. It is said that it was
executed literally under the shadow of the ruins of Luxor.
By this instrument he left to trustees the sum which has been named,
the interest of which should be expended for maintaining free public
lectures for the instruction of any who should choose to attend. The
will provided that nine tenths of the income should be thus expended
for the immediate purposes of every year. The remaining tenth is every
year added to the principal fund. The investments have been carefully
and successfully made, and as the will went into effect in the year
1839, the fund is now very much larger than it was when he died.
It has been admirably administered from the beginning. The first
Americans in the walks of science or of literature have been proud to
be enrolled on the list of its lecturers, and in many instances the
most distinguished savants from Europe have been called over with the
special purpose of lecturing to its audiences.
Before 1855 Lowell was, I may say, universally known and universally
admired. The announcement that he was to deliver a course of twelve
lectures on English poetry was gladly received in Boston. It proved at
once that it would be necessary to repeat the lectures in the
afternoons for a new audience of those who could not enter the hall in
the evening. But in both afternoon and evening courses multitudes were
turned away for whom there was no room in the hall. A much larger
“audience” was made up by the people who read the lectures from day to
day in the newspaper. My father and brother, who then conducted the
“Daily Advertiser,” arranged with Mr. Lowell that his old friend Mr.
Robert Carter should prepare the manuscript for that paper, and thus
the “Advertiser” printed each lecture on the day after its second
delivery, with the omission only of some of the extracts from the poets
of whom he was speaking.
These reports were carefully preserved by some scrap-book makers, and
from one of the scrap-books thus made the Rowfant Club of Cleveland
printed an elegant limited edition in 1897.
I borrow from another the description of Mr. Lowell’s manner as a
speaker in delivering these and similar addresses. This writer, who is
not known to me, says, first, that Mr. Lowell never imitates the stump
speaker and never falls into the drollery of the comedian. “His
pronunciation is clear and precise; the modulations of his voice are
unstudied and agreeable, but he seldom if ever raised a hand for
gesticulation, and his voice was kept in its natural compass. He read
like one who had something of importance to utter, and the just
emphasis was felt in the penetrating tone. There were no oratorical
climaxes, and no pitfalls set for applause.”
[Illustration:
JOHN HOLMES, ESTES HOWE, ROBERT CARTER, JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL
_From a photograph owned by General James Lowell Carter_]
The subjects of the twelve lectures are these: 1. Definitions. 2. Piers
Ploughman’s Vision. 3. The Metrical Romances. 4. The Ballads. 5.
Chaucer. 6. Spenser. 7. Milton. 8. Butler. 9. Pope. 10. Poetic Diction.
11. Wordsworth. 12. The Function of the Poet.
It is no wonder that the lectures were so popular. They are of the best
reading to this day, full of fun, full of the most serious thought as
well. And you find in them at every page, I may say, seeds which he has
planted elsewhere for other blossoms and fruit. For instance, here is
his description of a New England spring:—
“In our New England especially, where May-day is a mere superstition
and the May-pole a poor, half-hardy exotic which shivers in an east
wind almost as sharp as Endicott’s axe—where frozen children, in
unseasonable muslin, celebrate the floral games with nosegays from
the milliners, and winter reels back, like shattered Lear, bringing
the dead spring in his arms, her budding breast and wan, dilustered
cheeks all overblown with the drifts and frosty streaks of his white
beard—where even Chanticleer, whose sap mounts earliest in that dawn
of the year, stands dumb beneath the dripping eaves of his harem,
with his melancholy tail at half-mast—one has only to take down a
volume of Chaucer, and forthwith he can scarce step without crushing
a daisy, and the sunshine flickers on small new leaves that throb
thick with song of merle and mavis.”
We find much of this again in the “Biglow Papers;” perhaps the prose is
better than the verse. Indeed, you have only to turn over the pages to
find epigrams of which you might make proverbs. “Fortunately for the
ballad-makers, they were not encumbered with any useless information.”
“The ballads are pathetic because the poet did not try to make them so;
and they are models of nervous and simple diction, because the business
of the poet was to tell his story and not to adorn it.” “The only art
of expression is to have something to express. We feel as wide a
difference between what is manufactured and what is spontaneous as
between the sparkles of an electrical machine and the wildfire of God
which writes ‘_Mene, Mene_,’ on the crumbling palace walls of midnight
cloud.” “Even Shakespeare, who comes after everybody has done his best,
and seems to say, ‘Here, let me take hold a minute and show you how to
do it,’ could not mend that.”
Let no one suppose, because these lectures are thus delivered to what
is called a popular audience, that there is anything slight in the work
or superficial in the handling. Lowell was not the man to slight his
work because he had an audience of the people, or to treat the rank and
file with more superficial consideration than the men with epaulets or
sashes. Even if he had been, when he delivered one of these courses of
lectures he had before him his full share of the leaders of that
community, men and women to whom even a Philistine would not dare bring
the work of a slop-shop.
A good deal of the thought of these lectures appears, as I have said,
in other forms in some of his later publications. But, for whatever
reason, he never made a separate book of them. I think he says
somewhere in a private letter that he wanted to do it, and indeed had
meant to do it, but that he could not make the time; and that this was
a fair excuse any one will say who knows how steadily he worked and how
much work he had to do in study, in teaching, in writing and
proof-reading, and, in after life, in his diplomatic duties.
In 1874 Mr. Lowell was chosen the President of the Harvard Society of
Alumni, and from 1863 to 1871 he was President of the Phi Beta Kappa of
Cambridge. It is worth observing that no other President of the Phi
Beta has ever held that position so long. His immediate predecessor was
Judge Hoar, and his successor Richard Henry Dana. These two societies
exist chiefly to provide for the annual dinners of Cambridge graduates
at the College on Commencement Day and the day following. The fine
charm of the Phi Beta dinner is that it is not expected or permitted
that anything that is said shall be reported. You may look for the most
bubbling fun of some of the most serious men in the world, without any
terror of seeing it bewitched and reflected the next morning from the
cracked mirror of some ignorant boy who, when he reads his notes, can
see no difference between Voltaire and Valkyrie. But the Commencement
dinners, the day before the Phi Beta dinners, are open to the reports
of all men, angels, and devils, so that some of the sparks of Lowell’s
infinite fun may, with proper grinding, be thrown upon the kodak still.
He officiated as President of the Alumni in 1875 and 1876. Those years,
as the centennial years of the early Revolutionary events, kept every
one on the alert as to New England history. Here is a short extract
from each of these addresses:—
“But, gentlemen, I will not detain you with the inevitable suggestions
of the occasion. These sentimentalities are apt to slip from under him
who would embark on them, like a birch canoe under the clumsy foot of a
cockney, and leave him floundering in retributive commonplace. I had a
kind of hope, indeed, from what I had heard, that I should be unable to
fill this voice-devouring hall. I had hoped to sit serenely here, with
a tablet in the wall before me inscribed: ‘Guilielmo Roberto Ware,
Henrico Van Brunt, optime de Academia meritis, eo quod facundiam
postprandialem irritam fecerunt.’ [The reader must recognize here the
distinguished architects of Memorial Hall, which was then newly built.]
I hope you understood my Latin, and I hope you will forgive me the
antiquity of the pronunciation, but it is simply because I cannot help
it. Then, on a blackboard behind me, I could have written in large
letters the names of our guests, who should make some brave dumb show
of acknowledgment. You, at least, with your united applause, could make
yourselves heard. If brevity ever needed an excuse, I might claim one
in the fact that I have consented, at short notice, to be one of the
performers in our domestic centennial next Saturday, and poetry is not
a thing to be delivered on demand without an exhausting wear upon the
nerves. When I wrote to Dr. Holmes and begged him for a little poem, I
got the following answer, which I shall take the liberty of reading. I
do not see the Doctor himself in the hall, which encourages me to go
on:—
“‘My dear James,—Somebody has written a note in your name, requesting
me to furnish a few verses for some occasion which he professes to be
interested in. I am satisfied, of course, that it is a forgery. I
know you would not do such a thing as ask a brother writer, utterly
exhausted by his centennial efforts, to endanger his health and
compromise his reputation by any damnable iteration of spasmodic
squeezing. So I give you fair warning that some dangerous person is
using your name, and taking advantage of the great love I bear you,
to play upon my feelings. Do not think for a moment that I hold you
in any way responsible for this note, looking so nearly like your own
handwriting as for a single instant to deceive me, and suggesting the
idea that I would take a passage for Europe in season to avoid
college anniversaries.’
“I readily excused him, and I am sure you will be kind enough to be
charitable to me, gentlemen. I know that one of the things which the
graduates of the College look forward to with the most confident
expectation and pleasure is the report of the President of the
University. I remember that when I was in the habit of attending the
meetings of the faculty, some fourteen or fifteen years ago, I was
very much struck by the fact that almost every field of business that
required particular ability was sure to gravitate into the hands of a
young professor of chemistry. The fact made so deep an impression
upon me that I remember that I used to feel, when our war broke out,
that this young professor might have to take the care of one of our
regiments,—and I know he would have led it to victory. And when I
heard that the same professor was nominated for President, I had no
doubt of the result which we have all seen to follow. I give you,
gentlemen, the health of President Eliot, of Harvard College!”
Holding the same honorable though honorary office the next year, before
introducing the speakers, he said:—
“The common consent of civilized mankind seems to have settled on the
centennial commemoration of great events as leaving an interval
spacious enough to be impressive and having a roundness of completion
in its period. We are the youngest of nations, and the centuries to
us are not yet grown so cheap and so commonplace as Napoleon’s, when
he saw forty of them looking down in undisguised admiration upon his
armies bronzed from their triumphs in Italy. For my own part, I think
the scrutiny of one age is quite enough to bear, without calling in
thirty-nine others to its assistance. It is quite true that a hundred
years are but as a day in the life of a nation, are but as a tick of
the clock to the long train of æons in which this planet hardened
itself for the habitation of man and man accommodated himself to his
habitation; but they are all we have, and we must make the best of
them. Perhaps, after all, it is no such great misfortune to be young,
especially if we are conscious at that time that youth means
opportunity and not accomplishment. I think that, after all, when we
look back upon the hundred years through which the country has
passed, the vista is not so disheartening as to the indigestive fancy
it might at first appear. If we have lost something of that Arcadian
simplicity which the French travelers of a hundred years ago found
here,—perhaps because they looked for it, perhaps because of their
impenetrability by the English tongue,—we have lost something also of
that self-sufficiency which is the mark as well of provincials as of
barbarians, and which is the great hindrance to all true advancement.
It is a wholesome symptom, I think, if we are beginning to show some
of the talent for grumbling which is the undoubted heirloom of the
race to which most of us belong. Even the Fourth of July oration is
changing round into a lecture on our national shortcomings, and the
proud eagle himself is beginning to have no little misgiving as to
the amplitude between the tips of his wings. But while it may be
admitted that our government was more decorously administered one
hundred years ago, if our national housekeeping to-day is further
removed from honest business principles, and therefore is more
costly, morally and financially, than that of any other Christian
nation, it is not less true that the hundredth year of our existence
finds us, in the mass, very greatly advanced in the refinement and
culture and comfort that are most operative in making a country
civilized and keeping it so.”
On three occasions, at least, Lowell substituted for a prose lecture a
poem to which he gave the name of “The Power of Sound.” It is
constructed on the simple system which runs back as far as “The
Pleasures of Imagination,” giving us, for instance, the “Pleasures of
Hope” and the “Pleasures of Memory.” In these prehistoric days of which
I write, it was what you rather expected in a college poem: a
convenient thread on which to string the beads which might else have
been lying unused in box or basket.
Lowell gave the original copy of this poem to Mr. Norton, who edited it
carefully with interesting notes for an elegant edition of a few copies
printed by Mr. Holden. Some of the lines and several of the
illustrations in other forms were used by him elsewhere, and may be
found in his published poems:—
“Steps have their various meanings—who can hear
The long, slow tread, deliberate and clear,
The boot that creaks and gloats on every stair,
And the firm knock which says, ‘I know you’re there,’
Nor quake at portents which so oft before
Have been the heralds of the ten-inch bore?
“He enters, and he sits, as crowners sit,
On the dead bodies of our time and wit;
Hopes that no plan of yours he comes to balk,
And grinds the hurdy-gurdy of his talk
In steady circles, meaningless and flat
As the broad brim that rounds a bishop’s hat.
Nature, didst thou endow him with a voice,
As mothers give great drums to little boys,
To teach us sadly how much outward din
Is based on bland vacuity within?
“Who, untouched, could leave
Those Hebrew songs that triumph, trust, or grieve?
Verses that smite the soul as with a sword,
And open all the abysses with a word?
How many a soul have David’s tears washed white,
His wings borne upward to the Source of light!
How many his triumph nerved with martyr-will,
His faith from turmoil led to waters still!
They were his songs that rose to heaven before
The surge of steel broke wild o’er Marston Moor,
When rough-shod workmen in their sober gear
Rode down in dust the long-haired cavalier;
With these once more the Mayflower’s cabin rang,
From men who trusted in the God they sang,
And Plymouth heard them, poured on bended knees,
From wild cathedrals arched with centuried trees.
They were grim men, unlovely—yes, but great—
Who prayed around the cradle of our State.
Small room for light and sentimental strains
In those lean men with empires in their brains,
Who their young Israel saw in vision clasp
The mane of either sea with taming grasp;
Who pitched a state as other men pitch tents,
And led the march of time to great events.
“O strange new world, that yet wast never young,
Whose youth from thee by tyrannous need was wrung,
Brown foundling of the forests, with gaunt eyes,
Orphan and heir of all the centuries,
Who on thy baby leaf-bed in the wood
Grew’st frugal plotting for to-morrow’s food;
And thou, dear Bay State, mother of us all,
Forget not in new cares thine ancient call!
“Though all things else should perish in the sod,
Hold with firm clutch thy Pilgrim faith in God,
And the calm courage that deemed all things light
Whene’er the inward voice said, ‘_This is right!_’
If for the children there should come a time
Like that which tried the fathers’ faith sublime
(Which God avert!), if Tyranny should strive
On limbs New-England-made to lock her gyve,
Let Kansas answer from her reddened fields,
‘’Tis bastard, and not Pilgrim blood, that yields!’”
Until his death, his well-earned reputation as a public speaker made
constant calls on him for service in such directions. But no lover of
Lowell will suppose that lecturing to large audiences or to small was
much more than an “avocation” with him. The “Fable for Critics,” the
“Biglow Papers,” and other books belong to years when he was hard at
work as a college professor. His contributions to the journals which
were influential in reform still continued, though not so frequent as
before.
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