Edward Everett Hale

“ 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. ”

“ In the midst of a hundred or more of gentlemen who had served with him in the college he had the courage to say, “Harvard has as yet developed no great educator; for we imported Agassiz.”
On the 30th of April, 1889, there was a magnificent festival in the city of New York, at which he spoke. It is already forgotten by the people of that city and of the country, but at the moment it engaged universal attention. It was the celebration of the centennial of the establishment of the United States as a nation; the centennial of the birth of the Constitution; of the inauguration of Washington. ”

“ I think most youngsters of his time—who were born with a pen in hand—indulged in the same dream, if they were bred within sound of the college bell at Cambridge.
In those prehistoric days the “North American,” to the notions of the few hundred people who had ever heard of it, was wholly different from what any journal is now to any reader. Four times a year only—quarterly!—think of that, young contributors to to-day’s “Atlantic” who can hardly live three weeks, to know if that horrid man has refused your poem, or if that charming and sensible editor has printed it! ”

“ MR. LOWELL IN SPAIN The reader ought to understand that while the Spanish mission has always been spoken of by uninformed people as a somewhat lazy corner in that somewhat old-fashioned salon which takes the name of “Diplomacy,” the United States minister in Spain has always been walking amidst hot coals, or explosive friction matches. Some drowsy people, whose principal business in life has been to cut off the coupons from securities which other people had earned for them, waked up with surprise when they learned that this country had at last taken up the gauntlet of war. ”

“ If I am writing for those who have read Lowell carefully and loyally, they know that he knew that “the human race is the individual of which different men and women are separate cells or organs.” They know that he knew that “honor, truth, and justice are not provincialisms of this little world,” but belong to the life and language of the universe. They know that he knew that he belonged to the universe and was the infinite child of the infinite God. He says sometimes in joke that he hates to go to church. ”

“ But the people of America, at home, have wider interests than theirs, and affairs more important than they have. Lowell felt this in every fibre of his life, and if the Workingmen’s College in London, or some public meeting at Birmingham, or a Coleridge monument, gave him a chance to give to the people of England his notion of what the people of America are, and have in hand, why, he was most glad to do so. ”

“ But, all the same, Garrison came to Boston to publish the “Liberator.” There was not an “ism” but had its shrine, nor a cause but had its prophet. And, as in the rest of the world at that time, the madness was at its height which forms a “society” to do the work of an individual. People really supposed that if you could make a hundred men give each the hundredth part of his life to do something, the loose combination would do more work than one stalwart man would do who was ready to give one whole life in devotion to the “cause.” ”

“ Practically, I think, for the earlier years of James Lowell’s life, Elmwood furnished as large a world as he wanted. Within its hedges and fences the young people might do much what they chose. They were Mary, who was the guardian; then came William; afterwards Robert, whose name is well known in our literature; and then James. The four children were much together; they found nothing difficult, for work or for pastime. ”

“ Lowell excelled at once in original and critical work, thus giving the lie to the sneer that a critic is a person who has failed as a creator. Both as a poet and an essayist he revealed himself as a genuine cosmopolitan. He had the wisdom of the scholar and the horse sense of the man of the world. He was equally at home in the splendid realm of the imagination and in the prosaic domain of hard facts; and it may be said of him, as Macaulay said of Bunyan, that he gave to the abstract the interest of the concrete. ”

“ Literature was, as I said, the fashion. The books which the fellows took out of the library, the books which they bought for their own subscription libraries, were not books of science, nor history, nor sociology, nor politics; they were books of literature. Some Philadelphia publisher had printed in one volume Coleridge’s poems, Shelley’s, and Keats’s—a queer enough combination, but for its chronological fitness. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Lowell was already engaged to be married to Miss White. Their lives were wholly bound up in each other. He was writing to her charming letters in poetry and in prose, and she to him in letters as charming. They read together, they dreamed together, they forecast the future together. In such a daily atmosphere it was natural that he should choose that future rightly. ”

“ The “North American” is now so different from what it was in 1864, when Lowell took charge of it with Mr. Norton, that its accomplished editor will pardon me if I say ten words more about its infant issues, to the young writers of this generation. It was founded—modestly, yes, but with determination—among a little confident circle of the well-trained young men of Boston, at a moment when Boston counted, perhaps, fifty thousand people. These were people who had time to read, and time to write, and thought themselves, strange to say, the rivals and equals of anybody in the world. ”

“ Quincy had been, for years of gallant battle, a leader in Congress of the defeated and disconcerted wrecks of the Federal party. His white plume never went down, and he fought the Southern oligarchy as cheerfully as Amadis ever fought with his uncounted enemies. He was old enough to have been an aide to Governor Hancock when Washington visited Boston in 1792. In Congress he had defied John Randolph, who was an antagonist worthy of him; and he hated Jefferson, and despised him, I think, with a happy union of scorn and hatred, till he died. ”

“ And it is worth the while of young people to observe that in the group of men of letters at Cambridge and Boston, before and after James Lowell’s time, Samuel Eliot, William Orne White, James Freeman Clarke, Charles and James Lowell, John and Wendell Holmes, Charles Sumner, Wentworth Higginson, and other such men never speak with contempt of the niceties of classical scholarship. You would not catch one of them in a bad quantity, as you sometimes do catch to-day even a college president, if you are away from Cambridge, in the mechanical Latin of his Commencement duty. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Diplomacy, and the whole business of ambassadory, is, in fact, about as much out of place in our time as chain mail is, or as orders of precedence are. But people of sense try to make a new diplomacy in which each nation can approach, not the government of the other, but the people. Mr. Lowell, who could think on his feet, who could speak well in public, who had always something to say, and who, indeed, liked to say it, had a real “calling” in this line. ”

“ To a beginning so simple this group of young fellows, when hardly of age, gave dignity and importance. Under their lead the association established a large and valuable lending library, set on foot what were the most popular lectures in Boston, and kept up a well-arranged reading-room. It was virtually a large literary club, which occupied a building, the whole of which was devoted to books or to education. With the passage of two generations much of the work which the association thus took in hand has devolved upon the Public Library and its branches and upon the Lowell Institute. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Cabot is much wiser than I am. Dr. Holmes can write funnier verses than I can. Mr. Motley can write history better than I. Mr. Emerson is a philosopher and I am not. Mr. Lowell knows more of the old poets than I.” But after this confession he said, “But none of you knows the American people as well as I do.”
This was the truth, and they knew it was the truth. The “Atlantic,” at that moment, asserted its true place. It was not “The Boston Miscellany;” it was the journal for the nation, which at that time had no Pacific slope which needed to be named. ”

“ No girls ever lived with one heart and one soul in more complete union and harmony than these five. They were Anna Maria White, who married Lowell; Mary Story, who married George Ticknor Curtis; Augusta Gilman King and Caroline Howard King, and Sarah Everett Hale. In their personal talk, in their constant letters, they spoke of themselves as “The Band.” But I need not say that where there was such an intimacy as theirs, or where there was such an intimacy as their brothers’, the brothers and the sisters were equally intimate. ”

“ The home of each was the home of all. These homes were in Boston, Watertown, Cambridge, and Salem. Lowell was made as intimate in each of these homes as he was in his own father’s house. Among all these ten there was the simplest and most absolute personal friendship.
While the girls called this association “The Band,” the boys were more apt to call it “The Club.” Not that it ever had any place of meeting, any rules, any duties, or any other conditions of any club that was ever heard of; but that, generally speaking, where one of them was, there was another. If one had money, all had it. ”

“ The danger is that a man shall think that half the world is contained in the ring-fence which incloses the territory where they hear his academy bell. Can you conceive of a better antidote for his sweet poison, or a better rescue from his dangers, than the occupation of an editor? Mr. Lowell, in handling the “North American” and the “Atlantic,” had to see that there were people quite as much interested in life as he, who lived in Texas and in Washington Territory and in the Sandwich Islands and in New Zealand. ”