As the year 1874 opened, the question of Lowell’s return to college work was mooted. He had felt a little piqued at being suffered to leave, after sixteen years’ continuous service, without any concession from the college. He thought at least he might have been granted leave of absence on half pay, and when no proposal of this sort was made, he sent in a definite resignation. Now the authorities intimated that they hoped he would resume his old place. He was in doubt what he should do. He had tasted the pleasures of freedom; he remembered well the uncongeniality of much of his work; he was painfully conscious of lacking qualities requisite for success in the profession of teaching; he had, moreover, been disturbed by physical disabilities, especially in a blurring of memory and a weakness in his head which alarmed him; the trouble, he decided, was “flying gout,” a disorder to which he had been more or less subject for many years, and which never left him for long after this period. More disturbing still was the “drop of black blood” he had inherited from his mother, which was apt to spread itself over the pupil of his eye, darkening everything, and, as he said, temporarily inducing a mood of suspicion or distrust.

On the other hand, he was at a time of life when uncertainties of income were likely to create anxiety rather than to stimulate exertion. His income from the sale of his land had proved less than he anticipated, and he felt the need of a fixed increase. Moreover, he found that college life had become more of a habit than he suspected; the putting of the sea between him and it did not emancipate him, though it gave a temporary exhilaration. He was timid about experiments in living. Yet he was unwilling to allow himself to be governed in such a matter wholly by financial considerations. As he wrote to a friend: “If the worst came, I could sell my house and go into lodgings, which perhaps wouldn’t be so unwise after all. At any rate, I can’t let that be a prevailing motive to decide me about so sacred an office as that of Teacher.”

“I never was good for much as a professor,” he wrote to Mr. Norton, 2 February, 1874; “once a week, perhaps, at the best, when I could manage to get into some conceit of myself, and so could put a little of my go into the boys. The rest of the time my desk was as good as I. And then, on the other hand, my being a professor wasn’t good for me—it damped my gunpowder, as it were, and my mind, when it took fire at all (which wasn’t often), drawled off in an unwilling fuse instead of leaping to meet the first spark.” There was, besides all this, a possible complication with a friend in whose light he would not stand, and letting this tip the scales, he wrote refusing the reappointment. There came in reply a letter from the president of the college, removing the supposed complication and setting the whole matter in such a light that Lowell revoked his decision and accepted the appointment. It was characteristic of him, that though asked to send his final answer before a certain date, he dismissed the subject from his mind, and wrote from Paris three months later: “I don’t know whether I am a professor or no. On the second of May it suddenly flashed across me that I was to say yes or no before the first of that whimsical month, and that I had forgotten all about it. I meant to say yes on the whole, but if luck has settled it no, perhaps it’s for the best.”

A more consuming interest had driven professorships out of his head. He was in Florence at the time of this correspondence, and in Florence, too, when he heard of the death of Agassiz, and on the eve of leaving for Rome he was moved to write that elegy which, if it does not reach the height of his odes in poetical spirit, has that endearing quality which will continue to make it read as long as people continue to take delight in the verses in which poets celebrate their friendships. But Goldsmith’s “Retaliation,” Longfellow’s Introduction to the “Tales of a Wayside Inn,” Emerson’s “Adirondacs,” and Holmes’s occasional poems are in lighter vein than “Agassiz,” which stands midway in poetry between such poems and Milton’s “Lycidas.” As in the case of the others, it has a succession of portraits, but it strikes a deeper note; the elegiac quality is present, and the complaint, the linking of personal grief with universal emotion, the widening of sympathy, all serve to leave in the mind rather the mood of restless enquiry into deep problems of life, than of sensitive appreciation of a series of portraits. It is perhaps worth noting that he had just been reading Leslie Stephen’s “Essays on Free Thinking and Plain Speaking,” and had been stirred by the book into more or less of an enquiry of his own attitude toward the great questions of life and immortality. Referring to the book, he wrote to Mr. Norton: “I emancipated myself long ago, and any friendly attempt to knock off my shackles is apt to result in barking my shins, don’t you see? Science has scuttled the old Ship of Faith, and now they would fain persuade me that there is something dishonest as well as undignified in drifting about on the hencoop that I had contrived to secure in the confusion. They undertake to demonstrate to me that it’s a hencoop and an unworthy perch for a philosopher. But I shall cling fast. ’Tis as good as a line-of-battle ship if it only keep my head above water. I am so made that I allow no distinction between natural and supernatural. There is none for me. I am as supernatural a ghost as was ever met with. But I like Leslie’s book all the same. It is very able, honest, and clever—full of wit and trained muscle.” And to Mr. Stephen himself he wrote later: “My only objection to any part of your book is, that I think our beliefs more a matter of choice (natural selection, perhaps, but anyhow not logical) than you would admit, and that I find no fault with a judicious shutting of the eyes.”[54]

When one compares the portraits in “Agassiz” with the earlier sketches, sometimes of the same persons, in “A Fable for Critics,” one finds it easy to mark the mellower, richer tints in the later work. The poem was indeed almost a real posthumous work. Lowell, removed by an ocean’s width from his old comrades and his familiar haunts, mingled the dead and the living in his imagination and found in the whole concourse, headed by Agassiz himself, a microcosm of that world in which he took the greatest delight, the world of friendly, wise, and witty men. As in the case of the Commemoration Ode, it drew virtue from him, for he had put into it a large part of himself, and had been possessed by it. Shortly after finishing it, he wrote of his experience in the composition to Mr. Norton,[55] and later, when there had been time for the sensation to cool, for an interchange of comment and criticism, and for the poem itself to meet his eyes in its printed form, he wrote again:—

“To tell the truth, my collapse from the happy excitement of composition was so great, that when the poem came to me in print, it inspired me with something like that disgust a freshman feels at sight of an empty bottle the next morning after his first debauch. I have not been able to read it through yet, but have only turned to such passages as you thought needed retouching. In doing this a few others caught my eye. My dear boy, don’t you see (to answer what I forgot before and what you remind me of again) that Emerson and Longfellow are both, thank God, still in the flesh, and that I should not have mentioned them at all, but that I saw them so vividly I couldn’t help it. This, too, is my reply to what you say of a resemblance to a passage in Rogers (I thought it was Beckford). I think I see what you mean, but I regard it not, for the thought is altogether unlike, and came to me (as the receivers of stolen goods say) in the way of my business. I had gone out of myself utterly. I was in the dining-room at Parker’s, and when I came back to self-consciousness and solitude, it was in another world that I awoke, and I was puzzled to say which. It was a case of possession but not of self-possession. I was cold, but my brain was full of warm light, and the passage came to me in its completeness without any seeming intervention of mine. I was delighted, I confess, with this renewal of imagination in me after so many blank years. If there be any verbal coincidence with Rogers, I shall be surprised and sorry. It had never occurred to me, and I think if anywhere it must be in the couplet beginning: ‘In this abstraction.’ But I hope you will turn out to be mistaken. I am glad the poem is liked, though I cannot yet see it fairly. I thought it should be good by the state in which it left me and by the unconscious way in which it came. The only part I composed was the concluding verses, which I suspect to be the weakest part. The verse that cost me most trouble was the first, which, do what I would, insisted on being as Johnsonian as ‘Observation, with extensive view.’ But it is hard to put a wire into a verse without stiffening the latter.

“I surrendered the last verse about Longfellow without a murmur. I spoiled it by thinking more of the vehicle than what it was to carry. But Emerson’s nose must stand.[56] I will give you ‘shrewd’ instead of ‘wise,’ however, for it is better and (I think) the word that came first. I have not left my opinion of either of these two doubtful, for I have celebrated one in prose, and the other in verse, which is more than either of ’em has done for me, go to!

“I thank you heartily, my dear Charles, for all your criticisms. I like to hear them, and when I don’t agree it is not from self-love, of which (in such matters) I have as little as most men. But I have a respect for things that are given me, as the greater part of this was, and my poetry ought to show marks of design if it doesn’t. If I have done anything good, I owe it more largely to your sympathy, which spurred me out of my constitutional indolence and indifference, than to anything else. I like to tell you so, for it is true. I value my own natural gifts (as I think I have a right) but set no great store by my performance. I came into the world with a strong dose of poppy in my veins, and love dreaming better than doing. This has been a great hindrance to me, and I have struggled hard against it, but never against my consciousness of it.” ...

From Florence the Lowells went, 23 February, 1874, to Rome, and were with the Storys at the Palazzo Barberini.

To C. E. Norton.

To the Same.

To Miss Norton.

To C. E. Norton.

To W. D. Howells.

To George Putnam.

To Thomas Hughes,

To the Same.

The reference in the last sentence is to the generous language in which the degree of Doctor of Laws was conferred upon him by the University of Cambridge. He regarded the decoration as in a measure a friendly recognition of the University’s daughter in the American Cambridge, but he could not help being pleased by it. “You don’t know,” he wrote to a friend, of the public orator’s Latin speech, “what an odd kind of posthumous feeling it gives one.”

The Lowells sailed from Liverpool 23 June, 1874, and after a foggy and rainy passage were ten miles from Boston Light Friday evening, 3 July. There the fog caught them again and forced them to lie off till the morning, so that they reached Cambridge at half after nine o’clock on the Fourth of July.

CHAPTER XIII

POLITICS

1874-1877

“Thus far,” he writes to Mr. Godkin, 16 July, 1874, “I have nothing to complain of at home but the heat, which takes hold like a bulldog after that toothless summer of England, where they have on the whole the best climate this side of Dante’s terrestrial paradise. The air there always seems native to my lungs. As for my grandson, he is a noble fellow and does me great credit. Such is human nature that I find myself skipping the intermediate generation (which certainly in some obscure way contributed to his begetting, as I am ready to admit when modestly argued) and looking upon him as the authentic result of my own loins. I am going to Southborough to-day on a visit to him, for I miss him woundily. If you wish to taste the real bouquet of life, I advise you to procure yourself a grandson, whether by adoption or theft. The cases of child-stealing one reads of in the newspapers now and then may all, I am satisfied, be traced to this natural and healthy instinct. A grandson is one of the necessities of middle life, and may be innocently purloined (or taken by right of eminent domain) on the tabula in naufragio principle. Get one, and the Nation will no longer offend anybody. You will feel at peace with all the world.”

The summer was spent happily in the old familiar home. Lowell had no impulse to stir. He never could find any reason for escaping to the resorts in the White Mountains. “Why the deuce people fly to the mountains before the Last Day,” he wrote to Mr. Aldrich, “I can’t conceive, but when you get over your insanity and come back to the breezy plains again (thermometer 70° at half-past eight this morning), I shall hope to see you. My catbird saved one sonata for the first day of my home-coming and has been dumb ever since.”

Lowell fell to work at once in his study, giving laborious days to Old French and Old English and feeling a confidence which he expressed naïvely by saying that he used a pen instead of a pencil in his notes in his books. When the college term opened in the fall, he renewed his connection, walking up and down to his class-room and resuming his teaching of Dante and Old French. After his death the

more valuable part of his library came into the possession of the college either by his bequest[57] or by purchase, and the student having recourse to these books is constantly reminded of the care with which Lowell read them, pencil or pen in hand, going over the text as if it were proof-sheets requiring revision, and jotting down now textual criticism, now ingenious comparison with words and phrases in other languages. Sometimes he had two texts by him, and revised one by the other, sometimes his better knowledge or his mother wit enabled him to supply emendations to some careless editor’s work. The annotations show his keen philological interest. A word, whether in Old French, English, or Yankee was at once a lively image and an article in a museum. He never tired of pursuing the ancestry or the kin or the progeny of these winged creatures, and the very wealth of his puns testified to the quick association which his mind kept up with all the material of language.[58]

So far as the interpretation of mediæval literature went, Lowell’s intuitive perception and quick poetic sympathy enabled him to touch into life what to many scholars was a mere cadaver to be dissected; but in the historical treatment, and more especially in the comparative method, he was at the disadvantage of entering upon the study before the great work had been done in this field. It was probably on this account that though he covered a good deal of ground in his lectures to his classes, he did not avail himself of this work for publication.

Besides his academic work, Lowell took up also some writing, contributing verses during the next few months to the Atlantic and the Nation and making the last of his studies in great literature in an article on Spenser. A large part of the pleasure of these papers for him was the opportunity it gave him for a fresh reading of his author. “I have been very busy with Spenser,” he writes to Mrs. T. S. Perry, 28 February, 1875, “about whom I hope to have something in the next N. A. R. I have been reading him through again. It is as good as lying on one’s back in the summer woods.” To another friend he had written just before: “I have had a bath of Spenser. Your Turkish are nothing to him.” It is an illustration of the thoroughness with which he revised his work that this article on Spenser started as a lecture, but when he came to turn the lecture into a paper, he retained only a passage or two of the original form.

He confessed in a letter written in the summer of 1875 that he had become a quicker writer in verse and slower in prose than when he was younger. The confession may well have grown out of his experience in writing the two centennial odes for which he was called on this year, that “For the One Hundredth Anniversary of the Fight at Concord Bridge,” and that “Read at Cambridge on the Hundredth Anniversary of Washington’s Taking Command of the American Army, 3rd July, 1775.” Both were very nearly improvisations, the former being written in the two days before the celebration, and the latter at short notice after Dr. Holmes could not be had. The lyrical character of the Concord ode makes it sing a little more quickly to the ear of youth, and I think that while there are in it slight allusions to the dead Hawthorne and Thoreau, there is also a faint echo of the living Emerson. It would be strange indeed if Lowell, called thus to celebrate the fight which had already been celebrated in the noblest patriotic hymn in our literature, had not had the vision of Emerson before him as he wrote. What Emerson, who must have been present, said of the ode we do not know, but in a letter written after “Under the Old Elm” had been delivered and printed, Lowell quotes his comment on the second Ode. “I went,” he says, “to club on Saturday and nominated——, whom Emerson seconded. Longfellow was there and James and Quincy and Dr. Howe and Carter and Charlie L. and I. We had a very jolly club and good talk. Emerson was tenderly affectionate. He praised my Cambridge poem, saying that when he began it he said: ‘Why, he hasn’t got his genius on, but presently I found the tears in my eyes.’”

Into the second Ode Lowell put more thought and rose to the height of his great theme, for he was able to look at his country from the vantage-ground of the personality of Washington, and he read in the great past an augury of the future which for the moment at least did not vex his anxious mind. “I took advantage of the occasion,” he wrote to a correspondent who was Southern born, “to hold out a hand of kindly reconciliation to Virginia. I could do it with the profounder feeling, that no family lost more than mine by the civil war. Three nephews (the hope of our race) were killed in one or other of the Virginia battles, and three cousins on other of those bloody fields.”

In these two odes as well as in the one given on the great centennial day, the Fourth of July, 1876, Lowell spoke with no uncertain sound regarding those eternal truths of freedom and country which made patriotism with him a solemn passion. But so much the more impossible was it for him to close his eyes to the signs of defection from high ideals, or his lips when the impulse of speech came to him. In his poem on Agassiz written while still in Europe and obliged, as he has elsewhere said, always to be on the defensive, he gave expression to his deep scorn in a few lines which have not lost their sting, though a quarter of a century has passed since they were written. No one whose memory carries him back to the days of Grant’s second administration can forget the breathless fear of what next might be disclosed, and an American like Lowell, compelled to read the elegant extracts of peculation and fraud in high places which the English press in those days culled as examples of American public life, was even more keenly impressed than if he were in the midst of it all and could yet brace himself with the knowledge of better things mingled with these.[59] But the second stanza of the Agassiz was mild compared with the condensed bitterness of “The World’s Fair, 1876,” which he printed in the Nation, or the sarcastic arraignment in “Tempora Mutantur,” printed in the same journal. The longer poem, with its etchings of Tweed and Fisk, bitten in with an acid that is keener than any used in the “Biglow Papers,” is preserved in “Heartsease and Rue,” a record of shame that is wholesomely unpleasant to recall whenever one is disposed to be complacent. The other was set up for the same volume, but afterward withdrawn. It could well be spared from Lowell’s works, but has a stronger claim in a record of his life and character.

THE WORLD’S FAIR, 1876.

These verses, as may readily be guessed, brought out wrathful rejoinders, and Lowell was accused of having made a cheap exchange of his democratic principles for aristocratic snobberies when absent from his country. The situation called out a vigorous defence of Lowell in an article by Mr. Joel Benton, entitled “Mr. Lowell’s Recent Political Verse,” which was published in The Christian Union of 10 December, 1875. Lowell acknowledged the service in a letter to Mr. Benton which was printed after Lowell’s death in The Century Magazine, November, 1891. It is so valuable a witness to Lowell’s mind that I give it here again.[60]

To Joel Benton.

The article on Spenser, as I have said, was the last of the series of considerable studies of great authors which Lowell had been writing for the past ten years, and he now gathered the final sheaf into a second series of “Among My Books,” which he had hoped to bring out in the fall of 1875, but which did not appear until the spring of 1876. His activity in literature, and the accumulation of his published writings, were making him more steadily a conspicuous figure and calling out appreciation and criticisms. To Mrs. Herrick, who had been collecting material for an article on him, and had applied to him for facts and dates, he wrote, 6 October, 1875, after the appearance of her article: “If I were not pleased with what you have written about me, I must indeed be difficult, as the French say. It is not for me to comment on your discrimination, but I cannot be insensible to the truly feminine grace and delicate fervor of sympathy which run through the whole article.... You have given me a real pleasure and a real encouragement. I have never seen any of Mr. Wilkinson’s criticisms upon me,[61] but I know no reason to suspect any personal spite. He is ludicrously wide of the mark in what he says of the early reception of my writings at home and the later in England. I never belonged to any clique here, and the highest appreciation I ever received in England (degrees from Oxford and Cambridge) were when the Geneva delegation had left a very bitter feeling against everything American. I say this only for your friendly ears. I dare say I may seem to contradict myself sometimes, for my temper of mind is such that I never have the patience to read over again what I have once printed. As for my grammar, you may be quite easy. I know quite as much about English as Mr. W. is likely to do, and inherited my grammar, which is the best way of getting it. I think (from what others have told me) that you hit the nail on the head in saying that I have a kind of ‘vitality.’ But it is not wise to discuss one’s own qualities. I will only say that if nature had made me as strong in the driving as in the conceptive faculties I should have done more and better.

“I am glad your article is fairly over and out of the way, for now I can enjoy the pleasure of your friendship without any feeling of awkwardness. That I have been a help to you is a help to myself, and I thank you for telling me of it so frankly.

“When I wrote you last I was still very far from well. I am now (though not recovered) very much better, and my wits are beginning to clear again.”

His birthday in 1876 found him reflecting on the degree to which he was absconding from active life. “I get so absorbed,” he writes, “in the pretty shadows on the surface of Time, that I never notice the flowing of the current, and while I am musing, behold it has brought Next Year abreast of me.... I am going to dine with Gray, C. J., this afternoon to meet the Friday Club. I am invited to join it, and have been pondering over my answer these six weeks. I feel as if it might shake me up a little, for solitude is gradually making me numb. But I don’t know. I have the best possible Swift in my head, if I could only get him out. I have half written it twice, and am now going to begin again. You don’t believe me when I tell you that my mind is sluggish, but it is.” Apparently he had planned a paper on Swift of the proportions of one of his North American articles; what actually appeared was a brief review of Forster’s “Life of Swift” in the Nation. He wrote but little verse, though he was not neglectful of the work of others. “By the way,” he wrote to Mr. Howells, 21 March, 1875, “who is Edgar Fawcett? Those ‘Immortelles’ of his in the last Atlantic are in my judgment easily the best poetry in the number. I have been taken with things of his before, I remember. Why did you let the other man (whose name I have forgotten) spoil a charming little poem by writing Ac’tæon? I doubt if Artemis would have wasted an arrow in him—but Pallas Athene would have given him the ferule. It was so light and pretty, all the rest of it.”

In a nature like Lowell’s there is more the appearance of sluggishness than the reality. His industry is evident enough when one adds his published and uncollected writings to his regular academic duties. What may easily have provoked the popular notion of his indolence was the privacy of his life, the fact that he himself was little en evidence, and the casual on-looker seeing him sitting for hours over his books and pipe, taking his social recreation only in the seclusion of his own cherished home, and the libraries and dining-rooms of a very small circle of friends, hardly ever going even to Boston, and drawn when on his feet rather to Beaver Brook than to the pavements,—such an one might fancy him almost a scholarly recluse, living anywhere but in the American present.

But a great deal of the bustle of other men’s lives had its sphere of activity in Lowell’s mind. He was wont to retreat within himself, but it was to reflect on what he saw in the world about him. As has been seen already, he had commented on public affairs in verse which was not to be credited to his poetic sense so much as to his moral and political insight, and the tide of feeling was rising in his soul. It needed occasion only to bring him more actively into the current of affairs.

The changing of the time of which he had written so caustically had brought about what many to-day are disposed to regard as the lowest ebb of politics within the memory of man. As Grant’s second administration drew near its close, there began to be a stirring in the minds of men, and a resolution to reform the administration of government. The spectacle especially of the Southern States held in control by a combination of Northern carpet-baggers and negro politicians, backed by the Federal army, was one which filled with dismay those who had seen in the abolition of slavery the beginning of a new life for the nation; and the sordid view of public life which had resulted from this and from the unchecked abuse of political power in the distribution of public offices as rewards for party service, was leading to a determined effort at a reform of the whole civil service.

Lowell’s letters at this time indicate how deeply he felt the needs of the hour. In the spring of 1876 a number of young Cambridge men were inspired with a zeal to better the morale of the Republican party, which was the party in power and the one whose traditions made its better element ardent to purify it from the corruption which seemed to be fastening upon it. The effect of this rally was to call a large public meeting, and Lowell was invited to preside.

“Though I don’t think the function you wish me to perform,” he wrote in reply, “quite in my line, I am willing to do anything which may be thought helpful in a movement of which I heartily approve. I am not so hopeful, I confess, as I was thirty years ago; yet, if there be any hope, it is in getting independent thinkers to be independent voters.”

Here Lowell struck the note which had been the key of his political writing in the agitation against slavery, and that in which all his active political life after this was to be pitched. Independence, not in politics only but in the entire domain of human thought, had indeed been characteristic of all his work heretofore, and it was the solitariness of a life thus attuned which led to this slight expression of dejection. But he had been for all that a leader of the intellectual and thoughtful class in America, and it was a happy omen that collegians were in the group which was now to call him from his study into the field of political life.

Lowell not only presided at the meeting in Cambridge, but he became permanent chairman of the committee then formed for the organization of voters in Cambridge, a function which had been performed hitherto by office-holders under the government. The Congressional district to which Cambridge belonged then included also Jamaica Plain, and similar action was taken there under the leadership of the Rev. James Freeman Clarke. As a result of the movement Lowell and Dr. Clarke were selected at the district convention as delegates to the Republican convention in Cincinnati which was to nominate a candidate for the presidency.[62]

Lowell was very much interested in the position in which he found himself, nor could he help looking at himself in this new rôle with an amusing distrust. “Last night,” he wrote to Leslie Stephen, 10 April, 1876, “I appeared in a new capacity as chairman of a political meeting, where I fear I made an ass of myself. It was got up by young men who wish to rouse people to their duty in attending caucuses and getting them out of the hands of the professionals.... I think the row is likely to do good, however, in getting us better candidates in the next presidential election, and waking everybody up to the screaming necessity of reform in our Civil Service.”

It was about this time also, apparently, that Lowell’s name began to be connected with the diplomatic service of the country. It would seem as if his old friend Robert Carter had interested himself in the matter. At any rate, Lowell wrote him 13 April, 1876: “I am much obliged to you for your friendly interest, but you misunderstood my note to Page. I wrote it in haste to save the mail at John’s room, borrowing therefor his last sheet of paper. What I meant to say was that if, when the Russian Embassy was offered me, it had been the English instead, I should have hesitated before saying no. But with the salary cut down as it is now, I couldn’t afford to take it, for I could not support it decently.” A glimpse of his financial embarrassment at this time is seen in a letter to the same correspondent two days later, when, replying to the request for the gift, apparently, of his Fourth of July Ode to a newspaper, he says: “I can’t afford to give it away. The greater part of my income was from Western railroad bonds that have stopped payment, and the Atlantic (to which I have promised what I may write) will pay me $300 for it.” On the 19th of April, he writes again to Mr. Carter: “I return Mr. Fish’s letter. There is no more chance of their sending me to St. James’s than to the moon, though I might not be unwilling to go. On the old salary I might manage, and it might do my health good. I have little doubt it was offered to L[ongfellow] with the understanding that he would decline. I have not seen him for a few days. But it is too large a plum for anybody not ‘inside politics.’ It is the only mission where the vernacular sufficeth. Meanwhile you will be amused to hear that I am getting inside politics after a fashion. I shall probably head the delegation from our ward to the State convention.”

Lowell went to the National Convention at Cincinnati, like others of the same mind, with the hope of securing the nomination for the presidency for Mr. Bristow of Kentucky, who as a member of Grant’s cabinet had shown himself very active in the prosecution of malfeasants. The fact, moreover, that he came from Kentucky was an additional reason in Lowell’s mind. “I believed,” he wrote, that a Kentucky candidate might at least give the starting-point for a party at the South whose line of division should be other than sectional, and by which the natural sympathy between reasonable and honest men at the North and the South should have a fair chance to reassert itself. We failed, but at least succeeded in preventing the nomination of a man[63] whose success in the Convention (he would have been beaten disastrously at the polls) would have been a lesson to American youth that selfish partisanship is a set-off for vulgarity of character and obtuseness of moral sense. I am proud to say that it was New England that defeated the New England candidate.”[64]

In a letter written at two different times in the summer of 1876, to Thomas Hughes,[65] Lowell dwells at length upon the political situation and his own hopes and fears. His attitude toward public affairs was that of one who had not abandoned his fundamental beliefs but was questioning the methods of carrying them out, and was distrustful of existing machinery. He reiterates his conviction that the war was fought for nationality, and that emancipation was a very welcome incident. Hence he is inclined to lay the emphasis in reunion on the need of reconciliation with the Southern whites rather than on the protection of the blacks. He is disposed to sympathize with the Democratic party at the South but cannot overcome his distrust of the party as a whole. He bids his correspondent go slow in England in extending the suffrage, but he reasserts his unshaken faith in the people of his country. As the summer wears away he is more impatient over the confusion of issues, but on the whole thinks he shall vote for Hayes.

Lowell’s new interest in politics and his slight active part led his neighbors to wish to send him to Congress as representative from his district, and he was urged to stand, but he resolutely refused, confident that he had not the true qualifications for the office, though he was touched by the confidence shown in him. He did, however, accept the honorable position of presidential elector on the Republican ballot. He let off a little of his mind in the first draft of the verses “In an Album,” where the last four lines of the first stanza read:—