To the debit of his youthful zeal may be set down the lines on Emerson which were his footnote to the famous address to the Divinity School delivered 15 July, 1838:—
“Woe for Religion, too, when men, who claim
To place a ‘Reverend’ before their name,
Ascend the Lord’s own holy place to preach
In strains that Kneeland had been proud to reach,
And which, if measured by Judge Thacher’s scale,
Had doomed their author to the county jail!
When men just girding for the holy strife,
Their hands just cleansed to break the bread of life,
Whose souls, made whole, should never count it loss
With their own blood to witness for the cross,
Invite a man their Christian zeal to crown
By preaching earnestly the gospel-down,
Applaud him when he calls of earthly make
That One who spake as never yet man spake,
And tamely hear the anointed Son of God
Made like themselves an animated clod!”
To the credit of his manliness may be set down, per contra, the following letter which he wrote after the publication of the poem: a letter, which, for all its boyish assumption of the toga virilis, has a ring of sincerity about it:—
Cambridge, Sept. 1st, 1838.
Dear Sir,—In my class poem are a few lines about your “address.” My friends have expressed surprise that after I had enjoyed your hospitality and spoken so highly of you in private, I should have been so ‘ungrateful’ as ever to have written anything of the kind. Could I have ever dreamed that a man’s private character should interfere with his public relations, I had never blotted paper so illy. But I really thought that I was doing rightly, for I consider it as virtual a lie to hold one’s tongue as to speak an untruth. I should have written the same of my own brother. Now, sir, I trouble you with this letter because I think you a man who would think nowise the worse of me for holding up my head and speaking the truth at any sacrifice. That I could wilfully malign a man whose salt I had eaten, and whose little child I had danced on my knee,—he must be a small man who would believe so small a thing of his fellow.
But this word “ingratitude” is a very harsh and grating word, and one which I hope would never be laid to my charge since I stood at my mother’s knee and learnt the first very alphabet, as it were, of goodness. I hope that if you have leisure, sir, you will answer this letter and put me at rest. I hope you will acquit me (for I do not still think there is aught to forgive or pardon, and I trust you will not after reading this letter) of all uncharitableness.
Of course no one can feel it as strongly as I do, for since my friends have hinted at this “ingratitude” I have felt a great deal, and scarcely dare to look at the Tennyson you lent me without expecting some of the devils on the cover to make faces at me.
I hope you will find time to answer this and that I may still enjoy your friendship and be able to take you by the hand and look you in the face, as honest man should to honest man.
I remain yours with respect,
James Russell Lowell.
P. S. I have sent with this a copy of my “poem”—if it be not too tiresome, you would perhaps think better of me, if you were to read it through. I am not silly enough to suppose that this can be of any importance to you (if, indeed, you ever heard of the passage I refer to), but it is of very great importance to me.