Sez he wunt vote fer Guvnor B.”

The success of the first numbers naturally led Lowell to carry them further, and they became in the end an important factor in the anti-slavery politics of New England.

Meanwhile, as our next chapter will show, what we now look back upon as the “lecture system” was developing itself in the Northern States. With the ordinary stupidity of ecclesiasticism, most of the organized churches had succeeded in shutting out from their services the ultra speakers on whatever question. They confined their sermons on Sunday to the decorous wish-wash in which average men treated in a harmless way subjects to which the people were indifferent. Speaking of the English pulpit at the same period, under conditions not far different, Jowett says: “Really, I never hear a sermon of which it is possible to conceive that the writer has a serious belief about things. If you could but cross-examine him, he would perjure himself every other sentence.” The indifference with which wide-awake Americans, particularly of the younger generation, regarded such preaching, resulted in the development of the “lyceum system” of the North. Of this I will speak in some detail in the next chapter. It is enough to say here that the organized churches might thank themselves if they found, introduced into every community on weekdays, the most radical views, and frequently by speakers who would not have pretended to address them on Sundays. I am trying not to travel outside the line which I have marked for myself in these papers; but I do not pass that line when I say that a sort of indignation was aroused through the whole Northern community because the established church, in its various communions, was unwilling to devote itself to what was clearly its business, the fair discussion of the most important subject bearing on right and wrong which could possibly come before any people. The reader will find some valuable notes by Mr. Higginson, interesting of course, in “Cheerful Yesterdays.” “All of which he saw, and much of which he was.”

I refer to this now not because Lowell was often engaged in lecturing as one of the anti-slavery speakers. It must be remembered that this book is not so much a history of his life, as an effort to show the circumstances which surrounded his life and which account for the course of it. In his weekly contributions to the press, whether in prose or in verse, he kept in touch with the men and women who were quite in advance in forming the Northern or national sentiment of the crisis.

The “Liberty Bell” and the “Standard,” with his bright and suggestive articles, went into the circles which summoned Parker and Phillips and Garrison to give them instruction or inspiration which they would have sought in vain from the more decorous pulpits of that day. So it happened that, although he did not “enter the lecture field” as early as some of his companions and friends in the anti-slavery cause, he was, in those years of the awakening, perfectly well known among those interested in that cause.

In this connection it interests me to remember that the last time I saw his father, Dr. Lowell, was at the house in Elmwood in 1855. I went to him to ask for his assent and signature in a memorial relating to the freedom of Kansas, which was addressed to what we then called “The Three Thousand New England Clergymen.” I went to him because he was one of the oldest Congregational ministers in New England, and because he had always deprecated the separation between the evangelical and liberal branches of that body. He sympathized heartily in what we were doing, signed his name at the head of our circular-letter, and then put his hand on my head, and in the most cordial and pathetic way gave me and our cause an old man’s benediction. This, the reader should note, took place in the spring of 1855.

CHAPTER VIII
LOWELL AS A PUBLIC SPEAKER

It will be as well to bring into one chapter such references to Lowell’s work as a public speaker as may give some idea of the interest with which he was always heard, and, indeed, of his own evident enjoyment of the position of an orator.

He spoke with absolute simplicity, with entire ease, and he really enjoyed public speaking.