Lowell Institute

“ His books have been translated into foreign languages, including even Chinese. And in his lectures: in these, as through a rift in the clouds like a star, he shone, while his audiences sat spellbound. He was a marvel to those who heard him. Many will remember that in his last lecture course before the Lowell Institute in Boston (later crystallized into permanent form) , standing room was nil, and demands for admission were so numerous and insistent that repetitions were arranged for the evenings. ”

“ The Lowell Institute is too well known to need description, but one phase of it will bear mention in connection with the man who for so long was its trustee. Most institutions of learning live by begging. If they happen to be possessed of presidents who are past masters in the art, they thrive ; if not so blessed, they languish. That a president should be an able intellectual director is unfortunately not so pressing a demand as that he should be a persistent, importunate, and successful beggar. ”

“ Lowell was its intellectual body and its executive arm as well. For the Institute is a one man power, an absolute dictatorship. Mr. Lowell was president, corporation, and treasurer all together. And the success he made of it shows again the wisdom of such a rule, provided only the ruler be fit. Of his capacity as financier the property speaks ; of his ability in general administration the list of lecturers before the institution sufficiently betokens. ”

“ Lowell is sole trustee of the Institute, and can nominate whom he pleases. It was very richly endowed for the purpose of lectures by a merchant of Boston, who died a few years ago. You will get nothing like the same remuneration anywhere else. . .
Lyell and Mr. Lowell soon arranged all preliminaries, and it was understood that Agassiz should begin his tour in the United States by a course of lectures in Boston before the Lowell Institute. A month or two before sailing he writes as follows to Mr. Lowell. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Sprague made, under Dr. Gray’s directions, some drawings in color of the work planned, The Trees of North America. The work was never completed, too many things, expense, etc., coming in the way, but the few plates printed and colored by Prestele were issued in a small quarto pamphlet by the Smithsonian Institution in 1891.
[156] John Amory Lowell, 1798-1881; a Boston merchant, and a liberal patron of botany. He bought many valuable books and collected a fine herbarium. He shaped the policy and direction of the Lowell Institute founded by his cousin, John Lowell. ”

“ Lowell was identified with this phenomenally successful institution almost from its start. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology was founded in 1861, chiefly through the instrumentality of Prof. William B. Rogers. To the same eminent mind it owed its early success. Measure of the man's executive ability in the first place, its success was in the, long run the sign of his forethought in founding it. A school of technology was exactly what the American genius had demanded for many years in vain. It seems strange that no one should have heeded this unmistakable cry of nature before ”

“ It now furnishes lectures on practical and scientific subjects to workingmen, under the auspices of the Wells Memorial Workingmen's Institute.
As the University Extension Lectures carry the college to the people, so more and more the Lowell fund is carrying helpful and practical intelligence to every nook [Pg 16] and corner of a great city. Young people are stimulated to endeavor, encouraged to save time in which to gain knowledge, and to become useful and honorable citizens. ”

“ The number of “tutors” and “instructors,” to follow the college titles, increases in the same proportion. Lowell’s name does not appear on the list of the “Faculty” in 1855, I suppose because he was in Europe. The Faculty consisted of thirteen gentlemen, of whom President Eliot, then one of the junior members, and Professor James Mills Peirce are now the only survivors. Of his associates in the Faculty, Dr. Walker and Professors Felton, Peirce, Bowen, and Lovering had been his teachers when he was himself an undergraduate twenty years before. ”

“ If wealth, education, and breeding were to result in a class who could only carp and criticize, accumulate money, give way to self-indulgence, and cherish low foreign ideals, then would it have appeared that there was a radical unsoundness in our society, refinement would have been proved to be weakness, and the highest education would have been shown to be a curse, rather than a blessing. But Charles Lowell, and hundreds of others like him, in greater or less degree, all over the land, met the great test and emerged triumphant. ”

“ Every Sunday saw a procession of his old pupils, twenty years older, perhaps, than they were as undergraduates, who gladly seized this occasion to profit by the wisdom of their old counselor.
Cornelius Conway Felton, to whom I have already referred in speaking of the Mutual Admiration Society, succeeded Dr. Walker. He had been Greek Professor when Lowell was an undergraduate. His successor, Dr. Thomas Hill, graduated five years after Lowell.
Of his old professors Lowell found in office Lovering and Benjamin Peirce. ”

“ Harvard College, the Boston Athenæum, the American Academy, the Massachusetts Historical Society, the New England system of lectures, and the great free school system, which gave a liberal education to any boy who would take it,—these, all together, created a circle of authors. They created the “Monthly Anthology,” the “North American Review,” and the “Christian Examiner.” Such men as Bancroft, Prescott, Hildreth, Sparks, the Everetts, Hawthorne, Emerson, and now Lowell, came forward with books which had to be published. ”

“ I shall violate none of her secrets if I say, what the history of literature in America shows, that, in the earlier days at least, interest in literature was considered by those who directed the society as a very important condition in the selection of its members.
At Cambridge, when Lowell became one of its first members, there was a special charm in membership. Such societies were absolutely forbidden by a hard and fast rule. They must not be in Harvard College. The existence of the Alpha Delta chapter, therefore, was not to be known, even to the great body of the undergraduates. ”

“ I always think of Lowell as the most accomplished master of graceful English to whom I ever listened. I should never have heard or seen him, I should never have come across Llewelyn Davies or Tom Hughes, or many other men of mark in the world, had I not gone to the College. I went there, a young Oxford man, anxious to ‘do my bit,’ and thinking that I could confer benefits on others by teaching them. My experience is—and numbers of young University men have had the same experience—that I received infinitely more than I ever gave. ”

“ One does not need to doubt or believe in this particular collegiate method to give full assent to Lowell’s dictum that “the most precious property of culture and of a college as its trustee is to maintain higher ideals of life and its purpose, to keep trimmed and burning the lamps of that pharos, built by wiser than we, that warns from the reef and shallows of popular doctrine.” For as he moves forward in his address, he is drawn inevitably into a consideration of what was, first and last, the fundamental social question with him, the democratic idea. ”

“ He had refrained, as we have seen, from touching in his English address on Democracy upon the perils which beset it in its American stronghold, but here, at home, in the very heart of its stoutest defence, he must needs use these perils to emphasize his doctrine that the prime business of the college is to “set free, to supple, and to train the faculties in such wise as shall make them most effective for whatever task life may afterwards set them, for the duties of life rather than for its business, and to open windows on every side of the mind where thickness of wall does not prevent it.” ”

“ It has come about, healthy and strong, in the growth of the country—let us even say in the improvement of the world.
Presidents Quincy, Everett, Sparks, and Walker were all engaged in promoting the evolution of the university. After the close of that series come Thomas Hill and Charles William Eliot, the present incumbent, to whose energy, foresight, and courage so much of what may be called this revolution is due. I have already made some notes here of Mr. Quincy and Dr. Walker. It was in Walker’s administration that Lowell returned to the college as Smith professor. ”

“ At fifteen he entered Harvard College, then an [9] institution with about two hundred students. The course of study in those days was narrow and dull, a pretty steady diet of Greek, Latin and Mathematics, with an occasional dessert of Paley's Evidences of Christianity or Butler's Analogy. Lowell was not distinguished for scholarship, but he read omnivorously and wrote copiously, often in smooth flowing verse, fashioned after the accepted English models of the period. He was an editor of Harvardiana, the college magazine, and was elected class poet in his senior year. ”

“ 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. ”

“ In Lowell’s college work the weakest part was his class teaching. While no teacher in the university was more willing to help his boys, his habit of doing most of the reading, when a boy labored, with friction, breaking right into his reading, was not agreeable to the boy. ”

“ He studied law at the Harvard Law School and in the office of Russell and Putnam, being admitted to the bar in 1880. He formed a partnership with Francis Cabot Lowell, a relative, and after eleven years' successful practice the firm added to its membership Frederick Jesup Stimson. In 1897 Mr. Lowell retired from practice and was appointed lecturer at Harvard. He was made professor of the science of government in 1899. ”

“ The magazine was a part of that spontaneous literary activity which is pretty sure to find vent in college life outside of the class room, in independent reading, in societies sometimes secret, sometimes public, and in weekly, monthly, or quarterly journals. Lowell, with his growing consciousness{47} of literary faculty and his naturally vagarious impulses, turned aside from the set tasks of college, as we have seen, and allowed himself to be indifferent to the routine imposed by college regulations. There are always men in college who undertake to be independent while living in it ”

“ 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. ”

“ He was of too active a temperament to be much of a scholar in his youth, although in after life he went through with whatever he undertook in a thorough and conscientious manner. He went to Brown University, and appears to have lived much the same kind of life there which Lowell did at Harvard,—full of good spirits, admired by his classmates, as well as by the young ladies of Providence, and exceptionally fond of practical jokes; always getting into small difficulties and getting out of them again with equal facility. ”

“ Who shall count your vocation otherwise than noble and ennobling?”
Of their literary and studious habits, Professor A. P. Peabody, of Harvard University, gives his opinion in an article written not long ago in the Atlantic Monthly. He says, “During the palmy days of The Lowell Offering I used every winter to lecture for the Lowell Lyceum. Not amusement, but instruction, was then the lecturer’s aim.... The Lowell Hall was always crowded, and four-fifths of the audience [75] were factory-girls. When the lecturer entered, almost every girl had a book in her hand, and was intent upon it. ”

“ Meanwhile in his own fashion Lowell was stumbling on his way, gradually finding himself. He was a reader, as we have seen, before he went to college, and he continued to find his delight in books. “A college training,” he once said, is an excellent thing; but after all, the better part of every man’s education is that which he gives himself,” [15] and in college he was following, without{31} much reflection, the instincts of his nature, both as regards his reading and his writing. ”