Lowell was delegate to the Republican Convention, and presidential elector, in 1876. In 1877 he was appointed Minister to Spain, where he at once won the sympathies of the Spanish people. His coming was looked on as a revival of the days when Irving was minister. Among other honors, he received that of an election to the Spanish Academy. In January, 1880, he was transferred to London, the most important post in the American diplomatic service. Here he was equally successful in his larger field. He did more than any other minister has done to interpret to England the character and the strength of America, and to lay the foundations of that friendship, based on mutual respect, which has since been built up between the two chief branches of the English-speaking race. It has been said that he was the most popular man in England. Certainly no one was more in demand on every public occasion, especially where speech-making was in order. Lowell's speeches were clever, witty, always fitted to the occasion, and, wherever this was appropriate, were weighty and important; and they were almost as numerous as the days of the year. In these speeches he was always, on occasion, strongly American and strongly democratic. There is no better exposition of the American idea than his address on 'Democracy' at Manchester. And he conducted public affairs with absolute firmness, never yielding anything so far as America was in the right. With all his grace,' it has been well said, there was a plainness of purpose that could not be mistaken. Yet during his mission, and after his return to America, he was again bitterly assailed by the parti san press, who blamed him for his very success and for the respect which he had won. Because he was a gentleman and a man of the world, and had conducted affairs with courtesy as well as firmness, he was accused of being un-American, and of toadying to the British nobility. Nothing could be more unjust or farther from the truth. It was precisely because he was always and strongly American that he won the respect of the English. In many other Americans of culture, as for instance Washington Irving and Mr. Charles Eliot Norton, they had thought they found simply Englishmen transferred to an unfortunate environment and making the best of it. Lowell compelled them to feel that he was always, as one of them has expressed it, 'a scrappy Yankee,' and a typical Yankee. It was Lowell's great service to prove that a thoroughly typical American could be also a thorough gentleman, a man of broad culture, and, in every best sense, a man of the world.

He returned to America in 1885. Shortly before his return the second Mrs. Lowell died. He had married, in September, 1857, the sister of a close friend of his first wife, who had been chosen by her to care for her only daughter. He came back to find many of his best friends gone, among them Longfellow and Emerson, but younger friends still remained to him, like George William Curtis, Mr. Norton, and Mr. Howells. He wrote in the Postscript' (1887) of his Epistle to George William Curtis: '

Home am I come: not, as I hoped might be,

To the old haunts, too full of ghosts for me,
But to the olden dreams that time endears,

And the loved books that younger grow with years;

To country rambles, timing with my tread
Some happier verse that carols in my head,
Yet all with sense of something vainly missed,
Of something lost, but when I never wist.
How empty seems to me the populous street,
One figure gone I daily loved to meet,

The clear, sweet singer with the crown of snow
Not whiter than the thoughts that housed below!

And, ah, what absence feel I at my side,
Like Dante when he missed his laurelled guide,
What sense of diminution in the air

Once so inspiring, Emerson not there!

But life is sweet, though all that makes it sweet
Lessen like sound of friends' departing feet,

And Death is beautiful as feet of friend

Coming with welcome at our journey's end;
For me Fate gave, whate'er she else denied,
A nature sloping to the southern side;

I thank her for it, though when clouds arise
Such natures double-darken gloomy skies.

.

Little I ask of Fate; will she refuse
Some days of reconcilement with the Muse?
I take my reed again and blow it free

Of dusty silence, murmuring, 'Sing to me!'

These lines describe his last years. He returned to poetry; he completed his Endymion,' which has in it a quality rare in Lowell's work, the poetic suggestion of more than is expressed; and he wrote some exquisite lyrics, with a lightness of touch he had not possessed before, and some poems full of his best strength, like those on 'Turner's Old Téméraire' and on Grant. His last years gave us also important addresses like those on 'The Independent in Politics,' and Our Literature,' and charming essays like that on 'Izaak Walton.' He died at Elmwood, August 12, 1891.

6

Lowell is the largest and best rounded personality that our literature yet possesses. He has unquestionably written our best literary essays, and perhaps also our best political essays in literary form. In his poetry he has all but surpassed the other poets, each in his own field. He is as true a nature poet as Bryant; though he has nothing to compare with the higher ranges of Bryant's nature poetry, like the Forest Hymn,' _yet his treatment of Nature in her gentler aspects can well meet the comparison. To a Dandelion,' for instance, may be set beside To the Fringed Gentian.' What is more important, he writes of Nature with a happy intimacy which Bryant never had, as in the Indian Summer Reverie' and 'Sunthin' in the Pastoral Line,' and in many of the essays, like 'My Garden Acquaintance' and 'A Good Word for Winter.' There is a personal genuineness in his early work, especially the sonnets, which we do not find elsewhere except in Longfellow or Whittier, and in them it hardly has Lowell's deeper poetic quality; while in his later work, there is a high dignity which we do not find elsewhere except in Bryant. He is a true poet of New England country life, once at least, in 'The Courtin',' surpassing Whittier in his own field. He has written poems of sincere thought, though without the condensation and the fitness of form of Emerson at his best, in 'Bibliolatres,' 'The Lesson,' 'Masaccio,' The Miner,' 'Turner's Old Téméraire,' etc.; and these poems are somewhat more human in quality than Emerson's. He is our greatest humorist; the Biglow Papers have far broader and more significant power than the best of Holmes's humor, and the Fable for Critics' is almost as sparkling as the best wit of Holmes. If he is not a greater poet of occasions than Holmes, he is certainly a poet of greater occasions, and adequate to them. He has a lightness of touch in familiar verse that no one of our greater poets had (though it is to be found in Thomas Bailey Aldrich and others), as in Hebe,' The Pregnant Comment,' 'An Ember Picture' and 'Telepathy.' Yet there is something lacking in most of his work, something of charm, especially of rhythmic charm, something of poetic suggestiveness, something which he seems always striving after (see L'Envoi to the Muse," Auspex,' and 'The Secret'), and which now and then he does almost attain, as in 'In the Twilight.' He lacks, usually, just that last touch of genius, that St. Elmo's Fire ' playing over all, which he so well describes in his own essay on Keats. His life and character possessed something of this charm which did not quite get expression in his verse. He had a genius for friendship; he was one of the best talkers, and by far the best letter-writer, we have had; and we feel that uncaptured charm hovering near some of his poems of personal moods, like My Study Fire,' To Charles Eliot Norton,' or the 'Envoi to the Muse' and the others just mentioned. In personality, he was the fine flower of American society. Noble and varied as his verse is, he lived out his own motto,

The Epic of a man rehearse,

Be something better than thy verse.

He is our noblest patriot-poet, and our most complete and well-rounded man.

WALT WHITMAN

WHITMAN, like Holmes, was of combined Connecticut and Dutch ancestry. His immediate ancestors, like Whittier's, were farmers, but more prosperous, his father owning five hundred acres of good land on Long Island, which Whitman preferred to call by its Indian name of Paumanok. His mother's family were also prosperous farmers. On his father's side, the first American ancestor, Rev. Zachariah Whitman, came to this country in 1635 and settled at Milford, Conn. In the last part of the seventeenth century Long Island was settled, largely from Connecticut, and the son of Rev. Zachariah Whitman crossed the Sound with the others. At about the same time Whitman's ancestors on his mother's side, a family of Dutch origin, the Van Velsors, settled in Long Island a little further to the west, nearer New York. There was also Quaker blood in Whitman's veins, coming from his maternal grandmother.

Whitman's father, Walter Whitman, was a carpenter and builder as well as a farmer, and lived at Huntington, Long Island. There Walt Whitman was born, May 31, 1819, the second of nine children. He was christened Walter, but to distinguish him from his father was called Walt, and he kept this name throughout his life. When he was four years old the family moved to Brooklyn, and there Walt attended the public schools. He was still almost as much a country as a city boy, however. He tells of his expeditions with his comrades on the ice of the Long Island bays in the winter, and of his own walks on the bare shores of Coney Island in summer, which then, he says, 'I had all to myself.' These expeditions to deserted Coney Island lasted until he was more than thirty years old, and he tells how, in its solitudes, he loved after bathing to race up and down the hard sand, and declaim Homer and Shakspere to the surf and sea-gulls by the hour.' In 1833-34 he was in printing offices in Brooklyn, learning the trade, and until 1837 worked as compositor in Brooklyn and New York. For the following year or two he taught school in country towns on Long Island, and boarded round.' This,' he says, 'I consider one of my best experiences and deepest lessons in human nature behind the scenes and in the masses.' In the following year (1839-40), he started and published a weekly paper in his native town, probably doing both the writing and the typesetting himself. All these years,' he says, I was down Long Island more or less every summer, now east, now west, sometimes months at a stretch.' For the five years following 1840, all the time, and off and on for the next fifteen years, he lived winters in Brooklyn, working more or less as a compositor in New York city. He tells how his life was 'curiously identified with Fulton Ferry' (see the passage quoted in full in the note on 'Crossing Brooklyn Ferry '), how he crossed almost daily, often in the pilot-house, familiar with all the pilots, as he was in New York with all the omnibus drivers, with whom he spent many hours riding the length of Broadway. He passionately loved the great city and its sights and its people, and no one has given so vivid a picture of it either in verse or in prose. He had a passion for music also, spent night after night at the opera, and went much to the theatre. In 1848-49 he was editor of the Brooklyn Eagle. He had written more or less since 1839 for newspapers and magazines, among others the Democratic Review. A few specimens of this early writing, both in prose and verse, are preserved in his Complete Prose Works (pages 334-374). The Dough-Face Song' is good ordinary rhyme, and in both substance and form reminds us a little of the first series of the Biglow Papers, though it is dated earlier. His prose, so far as preserved, consists of story-sketches, which hold the reader's interest but are in no way remarkable. Among other things he wrote at this time a temperance tract, Franklin Evans.

In 1849 he broke away from all regular employment, and started off on a leisurely and apparently purposeless excursion, which was to be of great importance in forming the character of his later work. He calls it 'a leisurely journey and working expedition.' It must be described in his own words of brief summary. He went, he says, with his brother Jeff, through all the Middle States, and down the Ohio and Mississippi rivers. Lived awhile in New Orleans, and work'd there on the editorial staff of "daily Crescent " news

paper. After a time plodded back northward, up the Mississippi, and around to and by way of the Great Lakes, Michigan, Huron, and Erie, to Niagara falls and lower Canada, finally returning through central New York and down the Hudson; traveling altogether probably 8,000 miles this trip, to and fro.' From what we know of his life in New York and Brooklyn, we can infer what this expedition was to him. Speaking of the origin of Leaves of Grass, he once said, 'Remember, the book arose out of my life in Brooklyn and New York from 1838 to 1853, absorbing a million people, for fifteen years, with an intimacy, an eagerness, an abandon, probably never equalled.' With the same passion he must have absorbed the sights and the life of the country he passed through-almost the whole of the United States at that time - on this 8,000 mile excursion, making his own way, working here and there at his trade, living the life of the people. There are vivid reminiscences of the South constantly recurring in his later writing, as in the poem of the live-oak; and there is everywhere present the feeling of bigness, freedom, and heartiness, of the life of the West.

On his return, he took up for a little while his former occupations, editing and printing daily and weekly paper, the Freeman, and engaging, with his father, as he had done before going away, in the business of building and selling houses in Brooklyn. But he had now conceived the work which he was to do, to chant the songs of democracy as he understood it, to 'Compose a march for these States.' According to his first biographer, Dr. Bucke, he experienced a sort of conversion, and, like other mystics, felt his life-work given him as a mission. At any rate, he lost interest in other occupations, except so far as was necessary for simple self-support, gave up the successful house-building business, and devoted himself to the composition of his Leaves of Grass. This was issued without any publisher, the typesetting and printing having been done partly by Whitman himself, in 1855.

Apparently the last specimen we possess of Whitman's earlier style is the poem 'Sailing the Mississippi at Midnight,' probably written in 1849, and given, as by a rather pleasant irony are all the specimens which we have of his regular verse, in the Prose Works. I quote from what seems to be its original form, in the Notes and Fragments : —

The change from this style to that of the first edition of Leaves of Grass is so great that it seems as though some connecting links must be found in his newspaper writing of the time. Yet this is doubtful. The first edition of Leaves of Grass, he says, was printed 'after many MS. doings and undoings,' and possibly all the transition stages were lost in

this repeated revision. The section of First Drafts and Rejected Lines and Passages given in the Notes and Fragments does not show this transition, but is entirely in the style of Leaves of Grass itself. All that we know of the development of Whitman's peculiar style is what he tells us in one brief sentence: 'I had great trouble in leaving out the stock "poetical" touches, but succeeded at last.'

The first edition of Leaves of Grass had practically no sale. Some copies were sent out for review, which received little attention, and some were given away. Only one copy, so far as we know, won a real response, and that was the one sent to Emerson. His letter to Whitman must be quoted in full:

'I am not blind to the worth of the wonderful gift of “Leaves of Grass." I find it the most extraordinary piece of wit and wisdom that America has yet contributed. I am very happy in reading it, as great power makes us happy. It meets the demand I am always making of what seems the sterile and stingy Nature, as if too much handiwork or too much lymph in the temperament were making our western wits fat and mean. I give you joy of your free and brave thought. I have great joy in it. I find incomparable things said incomparably well, as they must be. I find the courage of treatment which so delights us, and which large perception only can inspire.

'I greet you at the beginning of a great career, which yet must have had a long foreground somewhere for such a start. I rubbed my eyes a little to see if this sunbeam were no illusion; but the solid sense of the book is a sober certainty. It has the best merits, namely of fortifying and encouraging.

'I did not know until I, last night, saw the book advertised in a newspaper, that I could trust the name as real and available for a post-office. I wish to see my benefactor, and have felt much like striking my tasks and visiting New York to pay you my respects.'

Whitman published this letter, together with his own long reply to it, in the second edition of Leaves of Grass, which appeared in 1856. On the back of this edition was printed, over Emerson's name, 'I greet you at the beginning of a great career.' All this was at least in somewhat doubtful taste, but Emerson was above resenting it or retracting anything he had said, though naturally in a private letter, acknowledging the gift of a book from its author, he perhaps expressed himself somewhat otherwise than he would have done in writing for public print. In 1856 he wrote to Carlyle, 'One book last summer came out in New York, a non-descript monster which yet had terrible eyes and buffalo strength, and was indisputably American.' (See the whole letter in the Carlyle-Emerson Correspondence, volume ii, page 283.) He visited Whitman in New York, as he had spoken of doing, and friendly relations were kept up between the two till the end of Emerson's life. In 1856 Thoreau also visited Whitman, and wrote of him soon after: That Walt Whitman... is the most interesting fact to me at present. I have just read his second edition (which he gave me), and it has done me more good than any reading for a long time. . . . There are two or three pieces in the book which are disagreeable, to say the least; simply sensual. . . . . On the whole it sounds to me very brave and American, after whatever deductions. I do not believe that all the sermons, so called, that have been preached in this land, put together, are equal to it for preaching. We ought to rejoice greatly in him. . . . Though rude and sometimes ineffectual, it is a great primitive poem, an alarum or trumpet-note ringing through the American camp. . . Since I have seen him, I find that I am not disturbed by any brag or egotism in his book. He may turn out the least of a braggart of all, having a better right to be confident. He is a great fellow.'

The personal impression Whitman made upon all who ever saw him seems to have been such as to counteract any previous notions they may have had of his work as being either 'egotistic' or 'sensual.' Howells, not a judge prejudiced in his favor, met him in New York in 1860, and speaks of the spiritual purity which I felt in him, no less than the dignity.' Howells had previously conceived him as the apostle of the rough, the uncouth. Now he found him to be the gentlest person; his barbaric yawp, translated into terms of social encounter, was an address of singular quiet, delivered in a voice of inning and endearing friendliness.'