“But there is one other argument which with me is conclusive. Nothing, in my opinion, is more unstatesmanlike, nothing more unwise than to revive sectional animosities for political purposes. Such expedients, though used for temporary effect, are lasting in their disastrous consequences. But scarcely less disastrous would be the fallacious hopes raised in the South by the success of Mr. Tilden. We are not willing to risk any of the results of the nation’s victory. One of the most important of those results was the assertion of our indivisible nationality. Mr. Tilden and the party which he directs have always been extreme in their interpretation of the reserved rights of the individual States, going so far even as to include that of rebellion among them. Should such principles prevail, revolution would become constitutional, and we should have another Mexico instead of the country we love. We should be admitting that the war, so costly to our prosperity, so incalculably dear in hopeful lives, was both a blunder and a crime. I for one am not ready for an admission like this. I prefer to feel myself the citizen of a strong country, to feel in my veins the pulses of an invincible nationality, whereof I am a member. An indissoluble union is the chain that holds us to our anchor. Its disjointed links would be old iron for the junkshop.”
This is not what one looks for in a speech at a party caucus. Neither the independence of the speaker’s attitude nor his moderate adhesion to the party in which he enrolls himself are very effective instruments, and it is clear that despite Lowell’s sympathy with the plain man and his intimate acquaintance with him as illustrated in his “Biglow Papers,” he was embarrassed when he came to speak to him in the collectivity of a public meeting, and scarcely let his natural voice even be heard. Much must be referred, it is true, to his inexperience with speaking at public meetings—he was not a speaker in the old anti-slavery days, but his inexperience was due largely to his fastidiousness of temper which made him after all in literature rather than in life pleased with the vision of
“The backwoods Charlemagne of empires new.”
He found his own voice more surely in his study than on the rostrum, and it is to his Fourth of July Ode in this centennial year that we must look for the most comprehensive and most natural expression of his political sentiment. In poetry he found it easiest to reiterate that faith which he had in an elemental America, as it were, a faith which was derived from a belief in God, and that
“Life’s bases rest
Beyond the probe of chemic test;”
but he refuses for all that to take refuge in a mere blind confidence, admitting a little ruefully that the flight of years had won him
“this unwelcome right
To see things as they are, or shall be soon,
In the frank prose of undissembling noon!”
The democratic principle, too, which he held so stoutly comes to him now as the manifestation of human life concretely apprehended rather than theoretically conceived, and the development of his own maturer judgment appears in this resolution to find the base of national life in the men who built the nation, and not in the mere speculation of freedom and democracy.
Lowell published the three odes called out by the centennial celebrations in a little volume entitled “Three Memorial Poems,” which he inscribed to Mr. Godkin “in cordial acknowledgment of his eminent service in heightening and purifying the tone of our political thought.” At the request of his publishers he was also assembling his poems for a new and so far complete collection in what was to be known as the Household Edition. Perhaps the title was in his mind when he wrote in the fall to a correspondent who had expressed his appreciation, “I would rather be a fireside friend and the Galeotto of household love than anything else. I was especially pleased that you had found out how much better the second series of the Biglow is than the first. I had not seen them for years when I had to read them through for a new edition this summer, and I found them entertaining.”
In February, 1877, Lowell went to Baltimore to give before the Johns Hopkins University a course of twenty lectures on the literature of the Romance Languages during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, with Dante as a central theme. His companion was his friend and colleague Professor Francis J. Child, who at the same time was discoursing on Chaucer. The tenth anniversary of the founding of the University was observed during their stay, and both men were the recipients of delightful hospitality, while by their lectures and readings and social gifts they made themselves most welcome guests. “J. L.’s good looks and insinuating ways,” wrote Mr. Child, “carry off the palm entirely from my genius and learning, but then I am as much fascinated as anybody, and don’t mind.” “Child goes on winning all ears and hearts,” wrote Lowell. “I am rejoiced to have this chance of seeing so much of him, for though I loved him before, I did not know how lovable he was till this intimacy.” A year later, Lowell writing to Child from Europe recalls the month as one of the pleasantest of his life. Lowell stayed with his kinsman Mr. Spence, but he found a frequent respite from the gayety in which he was involved in a quiet luncheon with his friend Mrs. Herrick, who tactfully forebore to make her luncheons additions to the social functions which excited but wearied as well.