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my bearings, not walk in procession with pomp and parade, in a conspicuous place, but to walk even with the Builder of the universe, if I may, not to live in this restless, nervous, bustling, trivial Nineteenth Century, but stand or sit thoughtfully while it goes by. What are men celebrating? They are all on a committee of arrangements, and hourly expect a speech from somebody. God is only the president of the day, and Webster is his orator. I love to weigh, to settle, to gravitate toward that which most strongly and rightfully attracts me; - not hang by the beam of the scale and try to weigh less, - not suppose a case, but take the case that is; to travel the only path I can, and that on which no power can resist me. It affords me no satisfaction to commence to spring an arch before I have got a solid foundation. Let us not play at kittlybenders. There is a solid bottom everywhere. We read that the traveler asked the boy if the swamp before him had a hard bottom. The boy replied that it had. But presently the traveler's horse sank in up to the girths, and he observed to the boy, I thought you said that this bog had a hard bottom.' So it has,' answered

sage. Do not trouble yourself much to get new things, whether clothes or friends. Turn the old; return to them. Things do not change; we change. Sell your clothes and keep your thoughts. God will see that you do not want society. If I were confined to a corner of a garret all my days, like a spider, the world would be just as large to me while I had my thoughts about me. The philosopher 10 said: From an army of three divisions one can take away its general, and put it in disorder; from the man the most abject and vulgar one cannot take away his thought.' Do not seek so anxiously to be 15 developed, to subject yourself to many influences to be played on; it is all dissipation. Humility like darkness reveals the heavenly lights. The shadows of poverty. and meanness gather around us, and lo! 20 creation widens to our view.' We are often reminded that if there were bestowed on us the wealth of Croesus, our aims must still be the same, and our means essentially the same. Moreover, if you 25 are restricted in your range by poverty, if you cannot buy books and newspapers, for instance, you are but confined to the most significant and vital experiences; you are compelled to deal with the ma- 30 the latter, but you have not got halfway terial which yields the most sugar and the most starch. It is life near the bone where it is sweetest. You are defended from being a trifler. No man loses ever on a lower level by magnanimity on a 35 higher. Superfluous wealth can buy superfluities only. Money is not required to buy one necessary of the soul.

I live in the angle of a leaden wall, into whose composition was poured a little 40 alloy of bell metal. Often, in the repose of my mid-day, there reaches my ears a confused tintinnabulum from without. It is the noise of my contemporaries. My neighbors tell me of their adventures with 45 famous gentlemen and ladies, what notabilities they met at the dinner-table; but I am no more interested in such things than in the contents of the Daily Times. The interest and the conversation are 50 about costume and manners chiefly; but a goose is a goose still, dress it as you will. They tell me of California and Texas, of England and the Indies, of the Hon. Mr.

of Georgia or of Massachusetts, all 55 transient and fleeting phenomena, till I am ready to leap from their court-yard like the Mameluke bey. I delight to come to

to it yet.' So it is with the bogs and quicksands of society; but he is an old boy that knows it. Only what is thought, said, or done at a certain rare coincidence is good. I would not be one of those who will foolishly drive a nail into mere lath and plastering; such a deed would keep me awake nights. Give me a hammer, and let me feel for the furrowing. Do not depend on the putty. Drive a nail home and clinch it so faithfully that you can wake up in the night and think of your work with satisfaction,- a work at which you would not be ashamed to invoke the Muse. So will help you God, and so only. Every nail driven should be as another rivet in the machine of the universe, you carrying on the work.

Rather than love, than money, than fame, give me truth. I sat at a table where were rich food and wine in abundance, and obsequious attendance, but sincerity and truth were not; and I went away hungry from the inhospitable board. The hospitality was as cold as the ices. I thought that there was no need of ice to freeze them. They talked to me of the age of the wine and the fame of the

vintage; but I thought of an older, a newer, and purer wine, of a more glorious vintage, which they had not got, and could not buy. The style, the house and grounds and entertainment' pass for 5 nothing with me. I called on the king, but he made me wait in his hall, and conducted like a man incapacitated for hospitality. There was a man in my neighborhood who lived in a hollow tree. His 10 manners were truly regal. I should have done better had I called on him.

its benefactor, and impart to its race some cheering information, I am reminded of the greater Benefactor and Intelligence that stands over me, the human insect.

There is an incessant influx of novelty into the world, and yet we tolerate incredible dullness. I need only suggest what kind of sermons are still listened to in the most enlightened countries. There are such words as joy and sorrow, but they are only the burden of a psalm, sung with a nasal twang, while we believe in the ordinary and mean. We think that we can change our clothes only. It is said that the British Empire is very large and respectable, and that the United States are a first-rate power. We do not believe that a tide rises and falls behind every man which can float the British Empire like a chip, if he should ever harbor it in his mind. Who knows what sort of seventeen-year locust will next come out of the ground? The government of the world I live in was not framed, like that of Britain, in after-dinner conversations over the wine.

How long shall we sit in our porticoes practising idle and musty virtues, which any work would make impertinent? As 15 if one were to begin the day with longsuffering, and hire a man to hoe his potatoes; and in the afternoon go forth to practise Christian meekness and charity with goodness aforethought! Consider 20 the China pride and stagnant self-complacency of mankind. This generation reclines a little to congratulate itself on being the last of an illustrious line; and in Boston and London and Paris and 25 Rome, thinking of its long descent, it speaks of its progress in art and science and literature with satisfaction. There are the Records of the Philosophical Societies, and the public Eulogies of Great 30 Men! It is the good Adam contemplating his own virtue. Yes, we have done great deeds, and sung divine songs, which shall never die,'- that is, as long as we can remember them. The learned societies 35 and great men of Assyria, where are they? What youthful philosophers and experimentalists we are! There is not one of my readers who has yet lived a vhole human life. These may be but the 40 spring months in the life of the race. If we have had the seven-years' itch, we have not seen the seventeen-year locust yet in Concord. We are acquainted with a mere pellicle of the globe on which we live. 45 Most have not delved six feet beneath the surface, nor leaped as many above it. We know not where we are. Beside, we are sound asleep nearly half our time. Yet we esteem ourselves wise, and have an 50 by hearing of this? Who knows what

established order on the surface. Truly, we are deep thinkers, we are ambitious spirits! As I stand over the insect crawling amid the pine needles on the forest floor, and endeavoring to conceal itself 55 from my sight, and ask myself why it will cherish those humble thoughts, and hide its head from me who'might, perhaps, be

The life in us is like the water in the river. It may rise this year higher than man has ever known it, and flood the parched uplands; even this may be the eventful year, which will drown out all our muskrats. It was not always dry land where we dwell. I see far inland the banks which the stream anciently washed, before science began to record its freshets. Every one has heard the story which has gone the rounds of New England, of a strong and beautiful bug which came out of the dry leaf of an old table of appletree wood, which had stood in a farmer's kitchen for sixty years, first in Connecticut, and afterwards in Massachusetts,— from an egg deposited in the living tree many years earlier still, as appeared by counting the annual layers beyond it; which was heard gnawing out for several weeks, hatched perchance by the heat of an urn. Who does not feel his faith in a resurrection and immortality strengthened

beautiful and winged life, whose egg has been buried for ages under many concentric layers of woodenness in the dead dry life of society, deposited at first in the alburnum of the green and living tree, which has been gradually converted into the semblance of its well-seasoned tomb,- heard perchance gnawing out now

JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL (1819-1891)

Though by far the youngest of the mid-century American writers, Lowell may be called the Dr. Johnson of the period. From 1857, when he assumed the editorship of the Atlantic Monthly, he was our literary dictator. He revised the manuscript of Thoreau until that individual genius refused longer to contribute to the magazine, he reproved Holmes who was ten years his senior, he wrote Whittier, I shall not let you rest until I have got a New England pastoral out of you,' he labeled and dismissed many of his contemporaries with almost brutal harshness, and he trained with dogmatic authority the new group of poets and novelists that was beginning to appear.

Lowell's ancestors like those of Emerson and Holmes, were New England Brahmins': he was of a long line of Puritan ministers. His father was stationed at Cambridge when Lowell was born and this house of his birth was the home of the poet — rare circumstance in America — during his whole life. Naturally he entered Harvard, and quite as naturally, since his temperament was not at all ministerial, he entered the legal course, actually finishing it and entering upon the practice of law, at least to the extent of producing a volume of poems A Year's Life, 1841. But law had no charms for the wayward young genius: like the youthful Longfellow, he dreamed of a literary career, and America as yet had not made literature a profession by which one might win a respectable livelihood. He tried editorial work, edited in New York a literary magazine, The Pioneer, which died after its third issue. In 1844 he launched another volume of poems which sold eleven hundred copies in three months. Emboldened by this unexpected income, he immediately was married, to a poetess of real inspiration, Miss Maria White, a marriage as perfect as that of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett. Both had become ardent abolitionists, and at once they started for Philadelphia where Lowell had secured a position as editorial writer for the Pennsylvania Freeman, which earlier had been edited by Whittier. The salary of ten dollars a month proved inadequate, and after four months they were again back in Cambridge. With the inspiration of his new home life upon him, there began now the creative period of his literary career. He wrote eagerly, copiously. In 1847 he began The Biglow Papers, his protest against the Mexican war. The next year, 1848, was the wonder year of his life. He issued a new edition of his poems. A Fable for Critics, The Biglow Papers, The Vision of Sir Launfal, and some twenty other articles and poems for the magazines. In 1851 with his family he went for a year to Europe. The following year Mrs. Lowell died, and his poetic period abruptly ended:

'My moon is set; my vision set with her.'

Save for the flashing up of his poetic soul at the time of the Civil War which produced his inspired improvisation, The Commemoration Ode, the rest of his life produced only prose. He became professor of French and Spanish at Harvard in 1855, entering upon his duties after a year in Europe and holding his chair until 1877. In 1857 he added the editorship of the Atlantic to his professional duties, and, resigning in 1861, became joint editor with Charles Eliot Norton of The North American Review, a position which he held until 1872. From 1877 to 1885 he was abroad, first as minister to Spain, then as Ambassador to the Court of St. James, England. His writings during the whole period are significant. They touch a broad variety of subjects: literary criticism, statesmanship, international politics, mere literature,' social problems. His pregnant studies of our American democracy were especially noteworthy. As a critic he has been in many respects overrated. His greatest work for American letters, undoubtedly, was his influence and guidance during a critical era. He stood ever for originality and native wood notes wild.' More than any one else, perhaps, he was instrumental in freeing American literature from the slavery of English and continental influences.