There was an incident at this time which illustrates the sensitiveness of the anti-slavery mind. The weight of literature was thrown against slavery, and it was a matter of pride and rejoicing that the most popular American poet, Longfellow, should bear his testimony in a thin volume of “Poems on Slavery.” But a Philadelphia publishing house, Cary & Hart, brought out a handsomely illustrated volume of his poetical works, from which this group of poems was omitted, and the leaders of the anti-slavery movement were indignant at what they regarded as the poet’s pusillanimity. Their journals attacked him bitterly, especially the National Anti-Slavery Standard, edited by Mrs. Chapman, Edmund Quincy, and Sydney Howard Gay. Lowell’s comments on the matter are interesting as throwing light on the attitude of his mind upon the question of the poet and his mission, which we have seen was so vital a one in his early history. He wrote to Briggs 18 February, 1846: ... “I never wrote a letter which was not a sincere portrait of my mind at the time, and therefore never one whose contents can hold a rod over me. My pen has not yet traced a line of which I am either proud or ashamed, nor do I believe that many authors have written less from without than I, and therefore more piously. And this puts me in mind of Longfellow’s suppression of his anti-slavery pieces. Sydney Gay wishes to know whether I think he spoke too harshly of the affair. I think he did, even supposing the case to be as he put it, and this not because I agree with what he tells me is your notion of the matter—that it is interfering with the freedom of an author’s will (though I think you were ironing with that grave face of yours)—for I do not think that an author has a right to suppress anything that God has given him—but because I believe that Longfellow esteemed them of inferior quality to his other poems. For myself, when I was printing my second volume of poems, Owen wished to suppress a certain ‘Song sung at an Anti-Slavery Picnic.’ I never saw him, but he urged me with I know not what worldly arguments. My only answer was—‘Let all the others be suppressed if you will—that I will never suppress.’ I believe this was the first audible knock my character made at the door of Owen’s heart—he loves me now and I him. My calling is clear to me. I am never lifted up to any peak of vision and moments of almost fearful inward illumination I have sometimes—but that, when I look down, in hope to see some valley of the Beautiful Mountains, I behold nothing but blackened ruins, and the moans of the downtrodden the world over, but chiefly here in our own land, come up to my ear instead of the happy songs of the husbandmen reaping and binding the sheaves of light yet these, too, I hear not seldom. Then I feel how great is the office of Poet, could I but even dare to hope to fill it. Then it seems as if my heart would break in pouring out one glorious song that should be the gospel of Reform, full of consolation and strength to the oppressed, yet falling gently and restoringly as dew on the withered youth-flowers of the oppressor. That way my madness lies.”

In the same letter, with the long-reaching speculation of a father over his first child, the subject of Blanche’s training is touched upon with a half serious, half playful exaggeration. Lowell had been writing humorously of his chivalric feelings toward dependents like the maid of all work in the house, and he breaks out: “I mean to bring up Blanche to be as independent as possible of all man kind. I was saying the other day to her mother (who has grown lovelier than ever) that I hoped she would be a great, strong, vulgar, mud-pudding-baking, tree-climbing little wench. I shall teach her to swim, to skate, and to walk twenty miles a day as her father can—and by the time she is old enough, I do not despair of seeing the world so good that she can walk about at night alone without any danger. You ask the color of her eyes. They are said to be like her father’s,—but, in my opinion, they are of quite too heavenly a blue for that. But I do not think the color of the eyes of much import. I never notice it in those I love, or in any eyes where I can see deeper than the cornea and iris. I do not know the color of my father’s eyes, or of any of my sisters’ (except from hearsay), nor should I know that of Maria’s except from observations for that special end. But where your glance is arrested at the surface, where these windows are, as it were, daubed over with paint (like those of rooms where menial or unsightly offices are performed which we do not wish the world to see, or where something is exhibited for pay) to balk insight—then the color is the chief sight noticeable. I do not believe that the finest eyes have any special hue—and this is probably the ground for the fallacy that poets’ eyes are gray—a kind of neutral color.”

In January, 1846, the publication was begun of the London Daily News, a paper which represented the most advanced liberal thought in politics and was for a short time conducted by Dickens. For this paper Lowell agreed to write a series of articles on “Anti-slavery in the United States.” His name was not to appear. Indeed, the scheme intended an historical sketch of the reform by one in sympathy with it, but not confessedly by an abolitionist. In pursuance of the plan four articles appeared in the months of February, March, April, and May, 1846, and the manner of treatment plainly supposed a much longer continuance, but it is probable that certain changes in the management of the paper rendered a continuance inexpedient; for in June the paper was lessened from a double sheet of eight pages to a single one of four, and the price reduced, leaving small opportunity for the leisurely essays which had formerly found place. The four papers did little more than clear the way, and really brought the historical sketch only down to the establishment of The Liberator by Mr. Garrison. For the most part the treatment is little more than an orderly and somewhat perfunctory recital of well-known facts, but once or twice the writer breaks forth into his more personal speech. Thus in the first article occurs this passage:—

“Unless we draw an erring augury from the past, that devoted little band who have so long maintained the bleak Thermopylæ of Freedom, remembering those in bonds as bound with them, as now they are the scoff and by-word of prospering iniquity, so will they be reckoned the Saints, Confessors, and Martyrs in the calendar of coming time, and the statues of Garrison, Maria Chapman, Phillips, Quincy, and Abby Kelley will fill those niches in the National Valhalla which a degraded public sentiment has left empty for such earthen demi-gods as Jackson, Webster and Clay.” Again the final article, after dealing with the Missouri Compromise, introduces Mr. Garrison upon the scene by quoting the preface to the first number of The Liberator, and goes on to say:—

“Now for the first time indeed Slavery felt itself assailed genuinely and in thorough earnest. But editors and other proprietors of public opinion manufactories in the Free States were slower of perception. They had not the warning of that instinctive terror which informed the slaveholder of the approach of danger. But they were soon satisfied of the dreadful truth that there existed in their very midst one truly sincere and fearless man, and instantly a prolonged shriek of execration and horror quavered from the Aroostook to the Red River. They saw, with a thrill of apprehension for the security of their offices or of their hold upon public consideration what treasonable conclusions might be legitimately drawn from their own harmless premises, harmless only so long as there was no man honest enough to make an application of them, and so cast suspicion on the motives of all. If the pitch and tow fulminations of Salmoneus had been suddenly converted into genuine bolts of Jupiter, he could not have dropped them from his hands with a more confounded alacrity. Here was a man gifted with a most excruciating sincerity and frankness, a hungry conscience that could not be sated with the cheap workhouse gruel of smooth words, and inconveniently addicted to thinking aloud.”

The article closes with this striking diagnosis:—

“The advent of Garrison was indeed an event of historical moment. The ban of outlawry was set on Slavery, and its doom was sealed. It matters not that since that time Slavery has won some of its most alarming victories. The nucleus of a sincere uncompromising hostility to it was formed. A clear issue between right and wrong, disentangled from the mists of extraneous interests, was presented to men’s minds. The question was removed from the dust and bewilderment of political strife to the clear and calm retirements of God’s justice and individual conscience. Henceforth the struggle must be not between the Northern and Southern States, but between barbarism and civilization, between cruelty and mercy, between evil and good. This was already in itself a victory, a triumph which would have been enough to round the long life struggle of a reformer with peace. Exaltation was achieved by the mere look, as it were, of an unknown, solitary, and friendless youth, so full was it of the potent conjuration of honesty and veracity. Whatever may be the contents of government mails and official bulletins, the shining feet of the messengers of Nature are constant and swift to bring to the ears of the lowly servant of Truth at least the sustaining news—that God still exists, and that He may select even the bruised reed for his instrument.”

It is not materially anticipating to record here what Lowell wrote of Garrison a couple of years later, when he was defining his own position on abolitionism, to his friend Briggs: “Garrison is so used to standing alone that, like Daniel Boone, he moves away as the world creeps up to him, and goes farther into the wilderness. He considers every step a step forward, though it be over the edge of a precipice. But, with all his faults (and they are the faults of his position), he is a great and extraordinary man. His work may be over, but it has been a great work. Posterity will forget his hard words, and remember his hard work. I look upon him already as an historical personage, as one who is in his niche.... I love you (and love includes respect); I respect Garrison (respect does not include love). There never has been a leader of Reform who was not also a blackguard. Remember that Garrison was so long in a position where he alone was right and all the world wrong, that such a position has created in him a habit of mind which may remain, though circumstances have wholly changed. Indeed, a mind of that cast is essential to a Reformer. Luther was as infallible as any man that ever held St. Peter’s keys.” But the most condensed expression of his feeling toward this remarkable man, who so dominated the anti-slavery movement, is to be found in the verses addressed to him beginning—

In May, 1846, occurred one of those personal incidents which stirred deeply the heart of the anti-slavery crusader and was made the occasion of public testimony. The Rev. Charles Turner Torrey, who had been an active writer and worker in the cause, and in 1834 was shut up in the penitentiary in Baltimore for having aided slaves to escape, died in May, 1846, of disease brought on by ill usage. He was of New England birth and his body was brought to Boston for burial. Besides the burial service there was a public meeting in Faneuil Hall on the evening of 18 May. Dr. Henry I. Bowditch, an ardent supporter of the anti-slavery cause and one of the committee in charge, wrote to Lowell on the 3d of the month, telling him that private advices led them to expect hourly the news of Torrey’s death, and that the plan was on foot for a public funeral service. If this is done,” he says, “we shall hope to hear from the poets of our land, the true ministers of God and of Christ, at the present era.... May I receive from your heart of love and high-souled honor sentiments such as I have not a few times obtained from your free-hearted poetry?” No appeal could have used so cogent an argument as that which thus characterized the poet, and Lowell responded with the lines, “On the Death of Charles Turner Torrey,” which were read at the meeting in Faneuil Hall by Dr. Channing. Dr. Bowditch thanked the poet for the response to his request, but doubted if the poem was not of too charitable a tenor. “Your poetry,” he says, “is a harbinger of better hours, but not for this century, as I fear we have missed the great idea of our existence and a new cycle of time must pass its round, and a new, a lovelier race of beings must settle on this earth ere man shall truly appreciate the divine doctrine you enunciate in the last line of your verses.”

Lowell had now become clearly identified with the anti-slavery cause and did not shrink from using the phrase “we abolitionists.” His reputation as a poet had steadily risen. He was contemplating a second series of his “Conversations,” and though he rarely used the instrument of poetry in direct attack, much of his verse sounded those notes of freedom and truth which were, even when abstractly used, rightly regarded as dominant notes in the songs of the times. The leaders of the anti-slavery cause welcomed him as an important coadjutor. At this time the National Anti-Slavery Standard was passing through one of the several changes sure to overtake the management of a journal which was the organ of such a bundle of individualities as would make up a reform party. The Standard was the official paper of the American Anti-Slavery Society, as the Liberator was the individual mouthpiece of Mr. Garrison. The Standard had been conducted successively by Mrs. Lydia Maria Child and her husband, David Lee Child. The former, who had marked literary ability and a fondness for the art of literature, had directed the paper in such a way as to win the attention of other than pronounced abolitionists; the latter had a stronger interest in legal and constitutional questions, and his disquisitions, which were inordinately long, must have wearied the readers whom it was desirable to gain over. Those who merely wished to hear their beliefs sounded may have had no fault to find, but these did not need conversion. The paper, therefore, passed in 1844 into the hands of Mrs. Chapman, Edmund Quincy,[56] and Sydney Howard Gay, who augmented the energy and diversity of the journal, but did not succeed in arresting the decline of its subscription list. In the spring of 1846 the paper had only about 1400 paying subscribers.

A further change seemed desirable, and the sensible one was made of concentrating the responsibility in the hands of one person, Mr. Gay, and endeavoring to reënforce him with an imposing list of regular contributors. This list was published 11 June, 1846, and comprised these names: Eliza Lee Follen, Rev. John Weiss, Charles F. Briggs, Wendell Phillips, James Russell Lowell, Maria Weston Chapman, Dr. William F. Channing, Rev. Thomas T. Stone, Edmund Quincy, and, a little later, Rev. Samuel May. It will be seen thus that there was a tolerable admixture of literature with polemics. Lowell had been urged to take a prominent place, and consented out of readiness to cast in his lot with the men and women who were heading the forlorn hope. He was perfectly aware, however, of a certain incompatibility of temper and aims which disqualified him from an unreserved submersion of his powers in this cause. The letter in which he gives in his adherence to the plan defines with much clearness his own consciousness of his vocation, and the very humorousness of the introduction intimates that he held off from the task of stating his position, as well as exhibits a mercurial temperament that would inevitably refuse to be kept within very exact limits. The letter is so important a disclosure of Lowell’s mind at this time that it must be given entire, though the most significant part has already been printed by Mr. Norton. Mr. Gay had written him under date of May, 1846: “It is with no little satisfaction that I welcome you into our company of standard-bearers to the anti-slavery host. I have long wished to see you actively engaged among us, and even had I no personal interest in the matter, the position you have chosen is precisely the one I should best like to see you in. You could nowhere do more good, and in no other way could you become so thoroughly identified with the cause. It is the historical cause of our day, and as the Future will know you as a Poet, she should find in our records additional evidence that you understood and fulfilled your mission.”

The “squib” to which Lowell refers in this letter was the first of the afterward famous “Biglow Papers,” introduced by the rustic letter of Ezekiel Biglow to Mister Eddyter. The poem was the one beginning

and the stanzas themselves have the inspiriting dash and electrifying rat-tat-tat of this new recruiting-sergeant in the little army of anti-slavery reformers. Lowell himself felt that he had sounded a real summons in these verses, yet singularly enough it was more than a twelvemonth before he followed with another in the same vein. The poem was at once copied into the Standard before the corrections its author sent could be made, and the next week appeared the first of Lowell’s prose contributions, a column and a half on Daniel Webster, whose intellectual strength made him the special mark of those men of New England who wished to turn all the artillery of native make against the great foe. Whittier’s two poems “Ichabod” and “The Lost Occasion” express nobly the mingled love, pride, and deep anger with which the anti-slavery men regarded this strong nature. “Ichabod” was written after Webster’s speech of 7 March, 1850, and Whittier may well have carried in his memory a sentence from Lowell’s trenchant unsigned article: “Shall not the Recording Angel write Ichabod after the name of this man in the great book of Doom?”

For some unexplained reason, though the connection was now made, for eighteen months after this editorial article Lowell printed little in the Standard save an occasional poem. The real connection was not made till the spring of 1848. In the number of the paper for 6 April of that year it was announced that for the ensuing volume the Standard would be under the charge of the present editor, Sydney Howard Gay, but with James Russell Lowell as corresponding editor. His name appeared thus on the headline of the paper and continued to keep its place until 31 May, 1849, when Edmund Quincy’s name was bracketed with it. For a while Mr. Quincy’s name took the second place, but as his contributions increased and Lowell’s diminished, they changed places in order, and finally Lowell’s name, though without any public announcement, was dropped from the headline 27 May, 1852, many months after he had practically ceased to contribute.

The definite arrangement which Lowell made with the Executive Committee of the American Anti-Slavery Society, who were the general managers of the Standard, was effected in a personal interview with Mr. Gay, who had come on to Dedham and there met Lowell. The conditions were simple and are rehearsed in a letter to Briggs, 26 March, 1848. Lowell was to receive a salary of $500 a year, and for this was to furnish a weekly contribution, either in verse or prose, but the verse was not to be restricted to direct attacks on slavery, and in his prose he now and then went outside the line of domestic politics, and occasionally even took up a distinctly literary topic. “The Committee,” writes Mr. Gay, “accepts your proviso of a termination to the arrangement whenever either party please, and accord to you any reasonable latitude in the choice of subjects that you may desire.” It was plain from the outset that Lowell was not overconfident of his ability to make the agreement one of mutual satisfaction. He felt that in his independence of thought he was not likely always to be at one with his associates, yet he was so heartily in accord with them in the fundamental doctrine of opposition to slavery, morally and politically, that he was glad of the opportunity of taking an active part in the fight. And then he undoubtedly looked to some advantage from the stimulus he should receive from the necessity of a weekly contribution. “I did not like,” he writes to Briggs, “to take pay for anti-slavery work, but as my abolitionism has cut me off from the most profitable sources of my literary emoluments, as the offer was unsolicited on my part, and as I wanted the money, I thought I had a right to take it. I have spent more than my income every year since I have been married, and that only for necessities. If I can once get clear, I think I can keep so. I do not agree with the abolitionists in their disunion and non-voting theories. They treat ideas as ignorant persons do cherries. They think them unwholesome unless they are swallowed stones and all.”

The first number of the Standard under this new arrangement, that for 6 April, 1848, which contained the announcement, held as Lowell’s initial contribution his “Ode to France,” which no doubt he had written without regard to this publication, for it bears date “February, 1848,” and indicates that in his study at Elmwood he was looking out on the large world, and was brooding over those great general ideas of freedom which were the intellectual and moral furniture of his being. He could exclaim:—

And in the next number of the paper he had an article on “The French Revolution of 1848,” in which he wrote wittily of the flight of the “broker-king,” and exultingly of the triumph of the idea of the people. “Louis Philippe,” he wrote, “extinguished the last sparks of loyalty in France as effectually as if that had been the one object of his eighteen years’ reign. He had made monarchy contemptible. He had been a stock-jobber, a family match-maker. The French had seen their royalty gradually

During a long and peaceful reign, the king had in no way contrived to grow on to the people. He was in no sense of the word a Head to them. A nation can be loyal to a Man, or to the representative of an Idea. Louis Philippe was neither. When all the Royalty of France can be comfortably driven out of it in a street-cab, one would think the experiment of a Republic might be safely ventured upon. To us the late events in Paris seem less a Revolution, than the quiet opening of a flower, [which,] before it can blossom, must detrude the capsule which has hitherto enveloped and compressed it.” The article disclosed Lowell’s eager faith in the French people as receptive and swift to appreciate and assimilate an idea. When in the summer the news came of mob violence, he wrote again, defending the workmen of Paris, and insisting upon it that the social order was to blame. “The great problem of the over-supply of labor,” he wrote, “is not to be settled by a decimation of the laboring class, whether by gunpowder or starvation. Society in a healthy condition would feel the loss of every pair of willing and useful hands thrust violently out of it. That these Parisian ouvriers were driven to rebellion by desperation is palpable. That they had ideas in their heads is plain from their conduct immediately after the Revolution. They were suffering then. It was they who had achieved the victory over the old order of things. In the then anarchistic state of the capital, rapine, had that been their object, was within easy reach. But the revolution of February was not the chaotic movement of men to whom any change was preferable to the wretched present. Not so much subversion as subversion for the sake of organization was what they aimed at. The giant Labor did not merely turn over from one side to the other for an easier position. Rather he rose up

It was light which the people demanded. Social order was precisely the thing they wished for in the place of social chaos. Government was what they asked. They had learned by bitter experience that it was on the body of old King Log Laissez-faire that King Stork perched to devour them. Let-alone is good policy after you have once got your perfect system established to let alone. There is not in all history an instance of such heroic self-denial as that which was displayed by what it is the fashion to call the Mob of Paris during the few days immediately following the flight of the Orleans dynasty. What was the shield which the noble Lamartine held up between the Provisional Government and the people? Simply the Idea of the Republic! And this Idea was respected by starving men with arms in their hands.”

The verses “To Lamartine,” also, which appeared in August, illustrate the appeal which French idealism made to Lowell’s mind. It is not surprising that the year 1848, which seemed at the time to witness the lifting of the lid from the Republican pot which was at the boiling point, should not only have quickened the pulse of lovers of freedom in America, but should have given generous-minded men here a twinge of envy as they contrasted the sanguine expectancy of Europe with what they saw of the seared conscience of America; and in the papers just quoted Lowell turns fiercely upon the public expressions of sympathy with the ruling powers of Europe. It was a natural transition from these reflections on the movements in France to ask bitterly in his next editorial article, “Shall we ever be Republicans?” In this he speculates on the extraordinary lack of agreement in the United States between names and things, and finds slavery the opiate which has made men’s minds drowsy.

“The truth is,” he declares, “that we have never been more than nominal republicans. We have never got over a certain shamefacedness at the disrespectability of our position. We feel as if when we espoused Liberty we had contracted a mésalliance. The criticism of the traveller who looks at us from a monarchical point of view exasperates us. Instead of minding our own business we have been pitifully anxious as to what would be thought of us in Europe. We have had Europe in our minds fifty times, where we have had God and conscience once. Our literature has endeavored to convince Europeans that we are as like them as circumstances would admit. The men who have the highest and boldest bearing among us are the slaveholders. We are anxious to be acknowledged as one of the great Powers of Christendom, forgetful that all the fleets and navies in the world are weak in comparison with one sentence in the Declaration of Independence. When every other argument in favor of our infamous Mexican war has been exhausted, there was this still left—that it would make us more respected abroad. We are as afraid of our own principles as a raw recruit of his musket. As far as the outward machinery of our government is concerned, we are democratic only in our predilection for little men.

“When will men learn that the only true conservatism lies in growth and progress, that whatever has ceased growing has begun to die? It is not the conservative, but the retarding element which resides in the pocket. It is droll to witness the fate of this conservatism when the ship of any state goes to pieces. It lashes itself firmly to the ponderous anchor it has provided for such an emergency, cuts all loose, and—goes to the bottom. There are a great many things to be done in this country, but the first is the abolition of slavery. If it were not so arrant a sin as it is, we should abolish it (if for no other reason) that it accustoms our public men to being cowards. We are astonished, under the present system, when a Northern representative gets so far as to surmise that his soul is his own, and make a hero of him forthwith. But we shall never have that inward fortunateness without which all outward prosperity is a cheat and delusion, till we have torn up this deadly upas, no matter with what dear and sacred things its pestilential roots may be entwined.”

Lowell had said to Briggs that he was not at one with the Abolitionists who favored disunion, and with that sanity of political judgment which made it impossible for him to be a revolutionist even in theory, he saw not in politics and political institutions that finality which rests in an organic national life. Thus he never could be a blind partisan, and he was quick to see the shams and concealments which were hidden in the conventions of political terms. A clever English publicist once said that the Constitution forms a sort of false bottom to American political thinking, and Lowell, who was as ardent and sensitive an American as ever lived, played most amusingly in one of the earliest of these newspaper articles with the conceit of “The Sacred Parasol.” He told Gay afterward that he wished he had put his paper into rhyme. If he had, he would doubtless have caught and held more attention by such a satire. Citing the marvellous incident reported by Father John de Peano Carpini of the people in the land of Kergis, who dwelt under ground because they could not endure the horrible noise made by the sun when it rose, he applied the parable to American politics, only it is the mode of thought that is subterranean, not the habit of living. “As we manage everything by Conventions, we get together and resolve that the sun has not risen, and so settle the matter, as far as we are concerned, definitively. Meanwhile, the sun of a new political truth got quietly above the horizon in our Declaration of Independence. Watchers upon the mountain tops had caught sight of a ray now and then before, but this was the first time that the heavenly lightbringer had gained an objective existence in the eyes of an entire people.” This was all very well, until the light began to penetrate dark places which it was for the interest of certain people to keep dark. “Fears in regard to heliolites became now very common, and a parasol of some kind was found necessary as a protection against this celestial bombardment. A stout machine of parchment was accordingly constructed, and, under the respectable name of a Constitution, was interposed wherever there seemed to be danger from the hostile incursions of Light. Whenever this is spread, a dim twilight, more perplexing than absolute darkness, reigns everywhere beneath its shadow.... It is amazing what importance anything, however simple, gains by being elevated into a symbol. Mahomet’s green breeches were doubtless in themselves common things enough and would perhaps have found an indifferent market in Brattle or Chatham Street. They might have hung stretched upon a pole at the door of one of those second-hand repositories without ever finding a customer or exciting any feeling but of wonder at the uncouthness of their cut. But lengthen the pole a little, and so raise the cast-off garment into a banner or symbol, and it becomes at once full of inspiration, and perhaps makes a Western General Taylor of the very tailor who cut and stitched it and had tossed it over carelessly a hundred times.... In the same way this contrivance of ours, though the work of our own hands, has acquired a superstitious potency in our eyes. The vitality of the state has been transferred from the citizens to this. Were a sacrilegious assault made upon it, our whole body politic would collapse at once. Gradually men are beginning to believe that, like the famous ancile at Rome, it fell down from heaven, and it is possible that it may have been brought thence by a distinguished personage who once made the descent. Meanwhile our Goddess of Liberty is never allowed to go abroad without the holy parasol over her head to prevent her from being tanned, since any darkening of complexion might be productive of serious inconvenience in the neighborhood of the Capitol.” With this grave banter Lowell goes on to instance cases where the Sacred Parasol has caused a shifting of relations in the twilight created by it, and warns people of the danger they would be in if exposed to the direct rays of the Sun of Righteousness.

The article shows the kind of reënforcement which Lowell brought to the anti-slavery camp. Edmund Quincy had something of the same wit and irony, but he had also a greater love of detail and busied himself over current incidents with the eagerness of a political detective, running down fugitives from divine justice with an ardor which was always heightened by the complexities of the case. Lowell, though he did not neglect to use incidents for the illustration of his argument, never got far away from the elemental principles for which his wit and sense of justice and love of freedom stood. He played with his subject often, but it was the play of a cat with his captive—one stroke of the paw, when the time came, and the mouse was dead.

Meanwhile the little band of the faithful, for whom the Anti-Slavery Standard was a weekly rally, read with delight the incisive editorial articles, and though they were not always supplied with downright arguments from this source, they had, what they scarcely got otherwise in the midst of their tremendous seriousness, the opportunity to rub their hands with glee over a telling rapier thrust, and also to have their horizon suddenly enlarged by the historical and literary comparisons which were swept into range by this active-minded scout.

The grim earnest in which Mr. Gay was working, in preparing for this weekly bombardment, left him little leisure for sitting down and admiring the mechanism of his guns, and Lowell in his retirement at Elmwood was more or less conscious of a certain doubt whether he was not firing blank cartridges. “You see,” he wrote, “that I have fallen into the fault which I told you I should be in danger of, viz., dealing too much in generalities. The truth is, I see so few papers except what are on our side that I cannot write a controversial article. I intend to review Webster’s speech and to write an article on the Presidential nomination. Perhaps they will be more to the purpose. Meanwhile, how can you expect a man to work with any spirit if he never hears of his employer? Why don’t you write me and say frankly how you are satisfied or dissatisfied, and what you want?” Gay wrote later: “You may be sure I shall write you fast enough when you write what you ought not; until I do you may be sure that I—so far as that is of any consequence—am pleased. I hear your articles spoken of highly from all quarters, and have heard only one criticism from one or two persons,—that they seemed to be written rather hastily. But that I believe is the way you write everything. It is a bad way to get into, though, and newspaper writing is a great temptation to it.”

The political doctrines which Lowell advocated were naturally not those of expediency, but of downright frankness and honesty. It is true that he and his associates had the great advantage, in proclaiming principles, of being quite unable to carry them out successfully at the polls. Such a position reënforces candor. Just as the Gold Democrats in the political contest of 1896 could draw up the most admirable platform that has been seen for many years, since they were out in the open, and were neither on the defensive nor preparing to carry their candidates into office, so the Abolitionists in 1848 felt under no obligation to support either Taylor or Cass, and could speak their minds freely concerning both. But Lowell, in the article which he wrote on “The Nominations for the Presidency,” characteristically struck that note of independence in politics which was a cardinal point in his political creed and was to be exemplified forcibly his life through, both in speech and conduct. In this he was not illustrating a principle which he maintained, so much as he was living a natural life. Independence was a fundamental note in his nature.

“The word NO,” he wrote, “is the shibboleth of politicians. There is some malformation or deficiency in their vocal organs which either prevents their uttering it at all, or gives it so thick a pronunciation as to be unintelligible. A mouth filled with the national pudding, or watering in the expectation of it, is wholly incompetent to this perplexing monosyllable. One might imagine that America had been colonized by a tribe of those nondescript African animals, the Aye Ayes. As Pius Ninth has not yet lost his popularity in this country by issuing a bull against slavery, our youth, who are always ready to hurrah for anything, might be practised in the formation of the refractory negative by being encouraged to shout Viva Pio Nono.[60]

“If present indications are to be relied upon, no very general defection from the ranks of either party will result from the nominations. Politicians, who have so long been accustomed to weigh the expediency of any measure by its chance of success, are unable to perceive that there is a kind of victory in simple resistance. It is a great deal to conquer only the habit of slavish obedience to party. The great obstacle is the reluctance of politicians to assume moral rather than political grounds.”[61]

It was, after all, a man of letters and not a journalist who was engaged on these weekly diatribes, and Lowell showed his instinctive sense of literary art not only in the abundance of allusion and in the use of such special forms as irony, but even now and then in the very structure of his essays, for essays they were rather than editorial articles, for the most part. Thus, taking his suggestion in topic from an attempt at running away slaves from the District of Columbia, he composes an Imaginary Conversation between Mr. Calhoun, Mr. Foote, and General Cass. There is an amusing, faint reflection of Landor in the manner of the piece, and the three personages are decidedly more discriminated in character than his old men of straw, Philip and John, so that the reader really seems to hear these worthies discoursing together, and not struggling against the betrayal of the master of the show, who is shifting his voice from one to the other. To be sure, no one would mistake the delicious irony of Lowell’s Mr. Foote for the grave and pious language of the real Mr. Foote, but the imitation is given with an air of seriousness. “It is a sentiment of the Bible,” Mr. Foote is made to say, “that riches have the wings of the morning and fly to the uttermost parts of the earth. But the South labors under this greater misfortune, that her property is endowed with legs of a kind of brute instinct (understanding I will not call it) to use them in a northerly direction. It is a crowning mercy that God has taken away the wings from our wealth. The elder patriarchs were doubtless deemed unworthy of this providential interference. It was reserved for Christians and Democrats. The legs we can generally manage, but it would have been inconvenient to be continually clipping the wings, not to mention possible damage to the stock. For these and other comforts make us duly thankful!