and the stanzas themselves have the inspiriting dash and electrifying rat-tat-tat of this new recruiting-sergeant in the little army of anti-slavery reformers. Lowell himself felt that he had sounded a real summons in these verses, yet singularly enough it was more than a twelvemonth before he followed with another in the same vein. The poem was at once copied into the Standard before the corrections its author sent could be made, and the next week appeared the first of Lowell’s prose contributions, a column and a half on Daniel Webster, whose intellectual strength made him the special mark of those men of New England who wished to turn all the artillery of native make against the great foe. Whittier’s two poems “Ichabod” and “The Lost Occasion” express nobly the mingled love, pride, and deep anger with which the anti-slavery men regarded this strong nature. “Ichabod” was written after Webster’s speech of 7 March, 1850, and Whittier may well have carried in his memory a sentence from Lowell’s trenchant unsigned article: “Shall not the Recording Angel write Ichabod after the name of this man in the great book of Doom?”
For some unexplained reason, though the connection was now made, for eighteen months after this editorial article Lowell printed little in the Standard save an occasional poem. The real connection was not made till the spring of 1848. In the number of the paper for 6 April of that year it was announced that for the ensuing volume the Standard would be under the charge of the present editor, Sydney Howard Gay, but with James Russell Lowell as corresponding editor. His name appeared thus on the headline of the paper and continued to keep its place until 31 May, 1849, when Edmund Quincy’s name was bracketed with it. For a while Mr. Quincy’s name took the second place, but as his contributions increased and Lowell’s diminished, they changed places in order, and finally Lowell’s name, though without any public announcement, was dropped from the headline 27 May, 1852, many months after he had practically ceased to contribute.
The definite arrangement which Lowell made with the Executive Committee of the American Anti-Slavery Society, who were the general managers of the Standard, was effected in a personal interview with Mr. Gay, who had come on to Dedham and there met Lowell. The conditions were simple and are rehearsed in a letter to Briggs, 26 March, 1848. Lowell was to receive a salary of $500 a year, and for this was to furnish a weekly contribution, either in verse or prose, but the verse was not to be restricted to direct attacks on slavery, and in his prose he now and then went outside the line of domestic politics, and occasionally even took up a distinctly literary topic. “The Committee,” writes Mr. Gay, “accepts your proviso of a termination to the arrangement whenever either party please, and accord to you any reasonable latitude in the choice of subjects that you may desire.” It was plain from the outset that Lowell was not overconfident of his ability to make the agreement one of mutual satisfaction. He felt that in his independence of thought he was not likely always to be at one with his associates, yet he was so heartily in accord with them in the fundamental doctrine of opposition to slavery, morally and politically, that he was glad of the opportunity of taking an active part in the fight. And then he undoubtedly looked to some advantage from the stimulus he should receive from the necessity of a weekly contribution. “I did not like,” he writes to Briggs, “to take pay for anti-slavery work, but as my abolitionism has cut me off from the most profitable sources of my literary emoluments, as the offer was unsolicited on my part, and as I wanted the money, I thought I had a right to take it. I have spent more than my income every year since I have been married, and that only for necessities. If I can once get clear, I think I can keep so. I do not agree with the abolitionists in their disunion and non-voting theories. They treat ideas as ignorant persons do cherries. They think them unwholesome unless they are swallowed stones and all.”
The first number of the Standard under this new arrangement, that for 6 April, 1848, which contained the announcement, held as Lowell’s initial contribution his “Ode to France,” which no doubt he had written without regard to this publication, for it bears date “February, 1848,” and indicates that in his study at Elmwood he was looking out on the large world, and was brooding over those great general ideas of freedom which were the intellectual and moral furniture of his being. He could exclaim:—
“Since first I heard our North-wind blow,
Since first I saw Atlantic throw
On our grim rocks his thunderous snow,
I loved thee, Freedom: as a boy
The rattle of thy shield at Marathon
Did with a Grecian joy
Through all my pulses run:
But I have learned to love thee now
Without the helm upon thy gleaming brow,
A maiden mild and undefiled,
Like her who bore the world’s redeeming child.”
And in the next number of the paper he had an article on “The French Revolution of 1848,” in which he wrote wittily of the flight of the “broker-king,” and exultingly of the triumph of the idea of the people. “Louis Philippe,” he wrote, “extinguished the last sparks of loyalty in France as effectually as if that had been the one object of his eighteen years’ reign. He had made monarchy contemptible. He had been a stock-jobber, a family match-maker. The French had seen their royalty gradually
‘melt,
Thaw, and resolve itself into a Jew.’
During a long and peaceful reign, the king had in no way contrived to grow on to the people. He was in no sense of the word a Head to them. A nation can be loyal to a Man, or to the representative of an Idea. Louis Philippe was neither. When all the Royalty of France can be comfortably driven out of it in a street-cab, one would think the experiment of a Republic might be safely ventured upon. To us the late events in Paris seem less a Revolution, than the quiet opening of a flower, [which,] before it can blossom, must detrude the capsule which has hitherto enveloped and compressed it.” The article disclosed Lowell’s eager faith in the French people as receptive and swift to appreciate and assimilate an idea. When in the summer the news came of mob violence, he wrote again, defending the workmen of Paris, and insisting upon it that the social order was to blame. “The great problem of the over-supply of labor,” he wrote, “is not to be settled by a decimation of the laboring class, whether by gunpowder or starvation. Society in a healthy condition would feel the loss of every pair of willing and useful hands thrust violently out of it. That these Parisian ouvriers were driven to rebellion by desperation is palpable. That they had ideas in their heads is plain from their conduct immediately after the Revolution. They were suffering then. It was they who had achieved the victory over the old order of things. In the then anarchistic state of the capital, rapine, had that been their object, was within easy reach. But the revolution of February was not the chaotic movement of men to whom any change was preferable to the wretched present. Not so much subversion as subversion for the sake of organization was what they aimed at. The giant Labor did not merely turn over from one side to the other for an easier position. Rather he rose up
‘Like blind Orion hungry for the morn.’
It was light which the people demanded. Social order was precisely the thing they wished for in the place of social chaos. Government was what they asked. They had learned by bitter experience that it was on the body of old King Log Laissez-faire that King Stork perched to devour them. Let-alone is good policy after you have once got your perfect system established to let alone. There is not in all history an instance of such heroic self-denial as that which was displayed by what it is the fashion to call the Mob of Paris during the few days immediately following the flight of the Orleans dynasty. What was the shield which the noble Lamartine held up between the Provisional Government and the people? Simply the Idea of the Republic! And this Idea was respected by starving men with arms in their hands.”