“If a naturalist showed us a toad we should feel indifferent, but if he told us that it had been found in a block of granite we should instantly look with profound interest on a creature that perhaps ate moths in Abel’s garden or hopped out of the path of Lamech.”
Most truly “No such lectures had been heard in America,” and as truly they deserve to be made more than a delightful memory for the early hearers alone.
Lowell wrote to a friend that at his first lecture he had held his audience for an hour and a quarter, but the reporter’s notes of that lecture fall far short of that fullness; nevertheless, compared with Anstey’s shorthand notes of Carlyle’s lectures on the “History of Literature,” we come much nearer to the living voice in the Boston “Advertiser’s” reports of these Lowell lectures. Carlyle spoke without a written text, nor had he any notes save a few bits of paper which in his hyper-nervousness he twisted out of all hope of reportorial decipherment—and without once looking at them; Lowell had his manuscripts (written currente calamo, for the new wine of life was in full ferment and it was no small feat to bottle any of it successfully), and we are assured from internal evidence that the “Advertiser’s” reporter was allowed access to them. His text has a tang as characteristic as Thoreau’s wild apples, and we do not feel the dubiety of the blind patriarch, “The voice is Jacob’s, but the hands are Esau’s.” No; it is James Russell Lowell, his voice, his inimitable mark, and these are his words sounding in our ears after half a century.
The only attempt at “editing” has been as far as possible to reproduce the reporter’s “copy.” To that end Lowell’s profusion of capitals is retained (and the reader will bear in mind that the Transcendental spirit was then in both the air and the alphabet), and even his italics, suggested, as Mr. Underwood says, by the speaker’s emphasis, find their respective places. Here and there a compositor’s error has been corrected and a proof-reader’s oversight adjusted; sometimes this has been conjectural, and again the needful change was obvious. In all else, save the applause, this Rowfant Book may be called a faint echo of the Lowell Institute Lectures.
It is “printed, but not published” in loving fealty to Lowell’s memory, and every Rowfanter has at heart the assurance that his Shade will look upon this literary flotsam without a frown, or with one that will soon fade into forgiveness.
S. A. J.
Ann Arbor, November 10th, 1896.
LECTURE I
DEFINITIONS
(Tuesday Evening, January 9, 1855)