Mr. Lowell’s real connection with the daily work of the college ceased in 1876, when he accepted the offer of the mission to Spain. It covered the period when he wrote most, and when, as his cousin has said so well, in the passage I have cited, his work in prose and poetry proved to be most satisfactory to himself. His duty afterwards as a diplomatist, in Spain and in England, was of value to the country and of credit to himself. And his life as a man of letters had prepared him for such work. But, all the same, it is as a man of letters that he will be most generally remembered.

During the twenty-one years from 1855 to 1876 the college was going through the change which has made it the university which it is. It had not only enlarged in the number of pupils, but the purposes and range of all persons connected with it widened with every year. This change from the “seminary,” as President Quincy used to call it, to the university of to-day has not been wrought by any spasmodic revolution planned by either of the governing bodies at any given time. It has come about, healthy and strong, in the growth of the country—let us even say in the improvement of the world.

Presidents Quincy, Everett, Sparks, and Walker were all engaged in promoting the evolution of the university. After the close of that series come Thomas Hill and Charles William Eliot, the present incumbent, to whose energy, foresight, and courage so much of what may be called this revolution is due. I have already made some notes here of Mr. Quincy and Dr. Walker. It was in Walker’s administration that Lowell returned to the college as Smith professor.

Cornelius Conway Felton, who succeeded Dr. Walker, had been the Greek professor, and had distinguished himself in his place as an editor of Homer and in papers on subjects of Greek literature. Perhaps he soon wore out his hopes for classes of schoolboys. Certainly in my time and Lowell’s, when we were undergraduates, he made little or no effort as a teacher to open out the work of the Greek poets whom we read. Alkestis or the Iliad were literally mere text-books. All the same, the boys believed in Felton. I remember one scene of great excitement when he was a professor, when we thought we were very badly used by the government, as perhaps we were. There was a great crowd of us in front of Holworthy, and Felton appeared on the steps of Stoughton or at a window. Somebody shouted, “Hear Felton! hear Felton! he tells us the truth,” and the noisy mob was still to listen. A man might be glad to have these words carved on his tombstone.

When with other men of letters, Dr. Felton was charming. And his kindness to his old pupils till they died was something marvelous. The published Sumner letters, the Longfellow letters, and other correspondence of the men of that time, with many of his careful reviews, and an occasional pamphlet, perhaps on some subject of controversy now forgotten, show how highly he was prized in his day and how well he deserved such esteem. For many years he was one of the most acceptable writers for the “North American Review.” He died, suddenly, after less than two years of service as President.

President Felton’s successor, Thomas Hill, was a graduate of Harvard, as all her presidents have been since Chauncy died in 1672. Dr. Hill was of a noble family,—if we count nobility on the true standards,—who were driven out of England by the Birmingham riots of 1791, and settled near Philadelphia. Dr. Hill was appointed president of Antioch College, Ohio, in 1859, and, after a very successful administration there, he was inaugurated at Cambridge in 1862. At Antioch he had succeeded Horace Mann in the presidency.

Dr. Hill’s health failed, and he resigned in 1868, leaving behind him charming memories of his devotion to duty and of the simplicity of his character. I called upon him once, with Dr. Newman Hall, when he was in this country. It was delightful to see the enthusiasm with which Dr. Hill spoke of the pleasure he expected in the evenings of the approaching winter, from studying, with his charming wife, the new text of the Syriac version of the New Testament, which had then just been edited by Cureton. He was one of the most distinguished mathematicians of his time. Here is an amusing note to him from Lowell about the arboriculture of the college yard.

My dear Dr. Hill,—I have been meaning to speak to you for some time about something which I believe you are interested in as well as myself, and, not having spoken, I make occasion to write this note. Something ought to be done about the trees in the college yard. That is my thesis, and my corollary is that you are the man to do it. They remind me always of a young author’s first volume of poems. There are too many of ’em, and too many of one kind. If they were not planted in such formal rows, they would typify very well John Bull’s notion of “our democracy,” where every tree is its neighbor’s enemy, and all turn out scrubs in the end, because none can develop fairly. Then there is scarce anything but American elms. I have nothing to say against the tree in itself. I have some myself whose trunks I look on as the most precious baggage I am responsible for in the journey of life; but planted as they are in the yard, there ’s no chance for one in ten. If our buildings so nobly dispute architectural preËminence with cotton mills, perhaps it is all right that the trees should become spindles; but I think Hesiod (who knew something of country matters) was clearly right in his half being better than the whole, and nowhere more so than in the matter of trees. There are two English beeches in the yard which would become noble trees if the elms would let ’em alone. As it is, they are in danger of starving. Now, as you are our Kubernetes, I want you to take the ’elm in hand. We want more variety, more grouping. We want to learn that one fine tree is worth more than any mob of second-rate ones. We want to take a leaf out of Chaucer’s book, and understand that in a stately grove every tree must “stand well from his fellow apart.” A doom hangs over us in the matter of architecture, but if we will only let a tree alone, it will build itself with a nobleness of proportion and grace of detail that Giotto himself might have envied. Nor should the pruning as now be trusted to men who get all they cut off, and whose whole notion of pruning, accordingly, is “ax and it shall be given unto you.” Do, pray, take this matter into your own hands—for you know how to love a tree—and give us a modern instance of a wise saw. Be remembered among your other good things as the president that planted the groups of evergreens for the wind to dream of the sea in all summer, and for the snowflakes to roost on all winter, and believe me (at the end of my sheet, though not of my sermon) always cordially yours,

Elmwood, December 8, 1863.

After President Hill’s resignation, Dr. Andrew Preston Peabody acted as president until the appointment in 1869 of Mr. Eliot.

I have already spoken, in one connection or another, of the professors to whom Lowell was most closely drawn,—with one or two exceptions. Dr. Asa Gray, the distinguished chief of botany in America, made his home a centre of all that was charming and interesting in the delightful circle of Cambridge society. Nothing could be more interesting than the simplicity of the spirited conversation of this most learned man, and the ease with which, while he really knew almost everything that was worth knowing, he spoke, with utter absence of effect or visible erudition. Where a working gardener would tell you with delight that this or that plant was the “Tomfoolaria eruditissima,” Gray would say, “Oh! that’s one of those Australian sandworts.” When he was still as fresh and cheerful as a boy, I heard him say, “It is great fun to be seventy years old. You do not have to know everything.”

Another of his colleagues who gave distinction to the college, in America and in Europe, was the late Josiah Parsons Cooke, whose position as a teacher and in the ranks of original students in chemistry is so well known.

Lowell’s own charming poem to Agassiz will be recalled by every one who cares for his life at Harvard. Not long after Agassiz had been invited from Switzerland to lecture before the Lowell Institute, he was appointed to a professorship in Cambridge, and he accepted the appointment. He lived in Cambridge from that time until he died, loving and beloved, in 1873. Mr. John Amory Lowell, the cousin of our Lowell, in his plans for the Lowell Institute, engaged Louis Agassiz to deliver one of their courses in 1847. His arrival in America may be spoken of as marking an era in education. Indeed, if the Lowell Institute had never done anything else for America than it did when it “imported Agassiz,” it would have a perpetual claim for our gratitude. With his arrival there was ended, once and forever, the poor habit of studying Nature through the eyes of other observers. Men learned again the lesson which makes them see where they look. For it may be fairly said that Agassiz created here the school of original study which has for a generation past directed the progress of natural science in America. I believe I ought to say that the phrase “imported Agassiz,” which I have ventured to quote, is Lowell’s own. In his address at the Quarter-Millennial of the college he had the hardihood to say that Harvard had not yet developed any first-rate educator, “for we imported Agassiz.”

I have never forgotten the enthusiasm of Agassiz’s audience the first time I ever heard him. His subject was the First Ascent of the Jungfrau, the maiden mountain which had never been scaled by man until Agassiz led the way. He told us, with eager memory, of all the preparations made for what men thought the hopeless invasion of those untrodden snows, of the personnel of the party, of their last night and early morning start at some encampment halfway up; and then, almost step by step, of the sheer ascent at the last, until, man by man, one after another, each man stood alone, where two cannot stand together, on that little triangle of rock which is the summit. “And I looked down into Swisserland.” As I heard him utter these simple words of triumph, I said that Mr. Lowell might take credit to himself for bringing before our audience the noblest and best specimen, so far discovered, of that greatest species of mammalia—long studied, but as yet little known—of the very finest type, from the widely scattered genus of the race of MAN.

The simplicity of Agassiz’s mode of address captivated all hearers. He put himself at once in touch with the common-school teachers. He had none of that absurd conceit which has sometimes parted college professors from sympathetic work with their brothers and sisters who have the first duty, in the district and town schools, in the infinite work of instruction and education.

Agassiz’s Cambridge life brought into Cambridge a good many of his European friends, and broke up the strictness of a village coterie by the accent, not to say the customs, of cosmopolitan life. To say true, the denizens of the forest sometimes intermixed closely with the well-trained European scholars. There used to be a fine story of a dinner-party at Dr. Arnold Guyot’s when he lived at Cambridge. An admiring friend had sent Guyot as a present a black bear, which was confined in the cellar of his house. Another friend had sent him a little barrel of cider, which was also in the cellar. As the dinner went on upstairs, ominous rumblings were heard below, and suddenly an attendant rushed in on the feast, announcing that the bear had got loose, had been drinking the cider, had got drunk, and was now coming upstairs. The guests fled through windows and doors. I am not sure that Lowell was one of them, but the anecdote belongs in notices of his friends.

I should not dare speak of a “village coterie,” nor intimate that at Cambridge there were men who had never heard of Fujiyama, or of places, indeed, not twenty miles away, but that these anecdotes belong a generation and more ago.

One of Lowell’s fellow professors told me this curious story, which will illustrate the narrowness of New England observation at that time. There appeared at Cambridge in the year 1859 a young gentleman named Robert Todd Lincoln, who has been already quoted, and is quite well known in this country and in England. This young man wished to enter Harvard College, and his father, one Abraham Lincoln, who has since been known in the larger world, had fortified him with a letter of introduction to Dr. Walker, the president of the college. This letter of introduction was given by one Stephen A. Douglas, who was a person also then quite well known in political life, and he presented the young man to Dr. Walker as being the son of his friend Abraham Lincoln, “with whom I have lately been canvassing the State of Illinois.” When this letter, now so curious in history, was read, Lowell said to my friend who tells me the story, “I suppose I am the only man in this room who has ever heard of this Abraham Lincoln; but he is the person with whom Douglas has been traveling up and down in Illinois, canvassing the State in their new Western fashion, as representatives of the two parties, each of them being the candidate for the vacant seat in the Senate.” What is more, my friend says it is probably true that at the moment when this letter was presented by young Robert Lincoln, none of the faculty of Harvard College, excepting Lowell, had ever heard of Abraham Lincoln. The story is a good one, as showing how far it was in those days possible for a circle of intelligent men to know little or nothing of what was happening in the world beyond the sound of their college bell.^[9]

It would be almost of course that, in a series of reminiscences which are not simply about Lowell but about his friends, I should include some careful history of the Saturday Club, which has held its regular meetings up to this time from the date of the dinner-party given by Mr. Phillips, as already described in the history of the “Atlantic.” But that story has been so well told by Mr. Morse in his memoir of Dr. Holmes, and by Mr. Cooke in the “New England Magazine,” that I need hardly do more than repeat what has been said before. In Morse’s “Life of Dr. Holmes” there are two pages of admirably well-selected pictures of some of the members best known. When the reader sees the names of gentlemen who have attended the club more or less regularly in forty years, he will readily understand why Emerson and Holmes and Lowell and others of their contemporaries have spoken of the talk there as being as good talk as they had ever heard anywhere. Holmes’s list, besides himself, was Emerson, Hawthorne, Longfellow, Lowell, Motley, Whipple, Whittier, Professors Agassiz and Peirce; John Sullivan Dwight, Governor Andrew, Richard Henry Dana, Jr., and Charles Sumner, Presidents Felton and Eliot, Professors Norton and Goodwin, William Hickling Prescott, Thomas Gold Appleton, John Murray Forbes, John Elliot Cabot, Henry James, William Dean Howells, Thomas Bailey Aldrich, William Morris Hunt, Charles Francis Adams, Francis Parkman, James Freeman Clarke, Judge Lowell, Judge Hoar, George Frisbie Hoar, and Bishop Brooks.

One of the last times when I saw Lowell and Emerson together was on the 18th of July, 1867, when Emerson delivered his second Phi Beta Kappa address. It had never happened before, I think, that the same orator should have spoken twice before Phi Beta Kappa with an interval of thirty years between the orations; nor is it probable that such a thing will ever happen again. In 1837 the word Transcendentalist was new, and it was considered “good form” to ridicule the Transcendentalists, and especially to ridicule Emerson. Yet he had his admirers then, especially his admirers in college, where the recollections of his poetry and philosophy, as shown when he was an undergraduate, had not died out. A few years ago I printed his two Bowdoin prize dissertations, written when he was seventeen and eighteen years of age, and they are enough to show that the boy, at that age, was father of the man. When he spoke in 1837, the oration was received in a certain patronizing way by his seniors. Mr. Cabot says, “He was regarded as a promising young beginner, from whom a fair poetical speech might be expected,” and the address was spoken of with a gay badinage such as could not be called criticism. I remember, at the frugal dinner-party of Phi Beta Kappa after the oration of 1837, Mr. Edward Everett, who was an enthusiastic Cambridge man and college man and Phi Beta man, said with perfect good nature of the Transcendentalists, that their utterances seemed to him to be compounded like the bolts of Jupiter,—

and made this extempore translation:—

Emerson was too young and too modest, and had too much real regard and respect for Everett, to make the reply which one thinks of now: “Whatever the bolts were made of, they were thunderbolts; and from Vulcan’s time to this time, people had better stand out from under when a thunderbolt is falling.” I can see Emerson now, as he smiled and was silent.

After thirty years people did not say much about “thirsty cloud” or “empty wind.” Emerson was in the zenith of his fame. He was “the Buddha of the West,”—that is Doctor Holmes’s phrase. He was “the Yankee Plato,”—I believe that is Lowell’s. And Phi Beta made amends for any vague questioning in the past by the enthusiasm with which it received him for the second time.

A queer thing happened on that morning. Emerson had a passion to the last for changing the order of his utterances. He would put the tenth sheet in place of the fifth, and the fifth in place of the fifteenth, up to the issue of the last “extra” of an oration. It was Miss Ellen Emerson, I think, who took upon herself the duty of putting these sheets in order on this occasion, and sewing them so stiffly together that they could not be twitched apart by any sudden movement at the desk. But the fact that they were sewed together was an embarrassment to him. What was worse was that he met his brother, William Emerson, that morning. I think they looked over the address together, and in doing so it happened that Waldo Emerson took William Emerson’s glasses and William took Waldo’s. Waldo did not discover his error till he stood in the pulpit before the assembly. Worse than either, perhaps, some too careful janitor had carried away the high desk from the pulpit of the church, and had left Emerson, tall and with the wrong spectacles, to read the address far below his eyes. It was not till the first passage of the address was finished that this difficulty of the desk could be rectified; but the whole audience was in sympathy with him, and the little hitch, if one may call it so, which this made seemed only to bring them closer together.

The address will be found in the eighth volume of his works, and will be remembered by every one who heard it; but, on the whole, what impresses me the most in memory is the hearty thoroughness and cordiality of Lowell’s congratulations when Emerson turned round after finishing the oration. “Par nobile fratrum,” as one said; and one felt glad to have seen two such men together on such a day. Lowell himself said of it, a few days later:—

“Emerson’s oration was more disjointed than usual even with him. It began nowhere and ended everywhere; and yet, as always with that divine man, it left you feeling that something beautiful had passed that way, something more beautiful than anything else, like the rising and setting of stars. Every possible criticism might have been made on it, except that it was not noble. There was a tone in it that awakened all elevating associations. He boggled, he lost his place, he had to put on his glasses; but it was as if a creature from some fairer world had lost his way in our fogs, and it was our fault and not his. It was chaotic, but it was all such stuff as stars are made of, and you could not help feeling that if you waited awhile all that was nebulous would be hurled into planets, and would assume the mathematical gravity of system. All through it I felt something in me that cried, ‘Ha, ha! to the sound of trumpets!’”

On the 9th of July, 1872, Lowell and Mrs. Lowell sailed for Europe, without any plans, as he himself says. They remained abroad two years. They landed in England, but early in the winter he established himself, for six months as it proved, in Paris. They were in a nice little hotel there, where he is still remembered cordially,—the Hotel de France et Lorraine. Here they lived quietly from November to the next summer.

He was in Paris in the last years of M. Thiers. The interests of politics centred on the relations between President Thiers and the Commission of Thirty,—long since, I am afraid, forgotten by this reader. Lowell writes of Thiers’s resignation, which closed his long career of public life, “I think it was the egotism of Thiers that overset him rather than any policy he was supposed to have.”

Of this sojourn in Paris a near friend of his gives me the following pleasant note:—

“In the little office of the Hotel France et Lorraine, Rue de Beaune, Paris, hangs a fairly good likeness of James Russell Lowell, a large photograph, I think, taken some years before his death. It is, and has been for twenty years and more, the presiding presence of the little sanctum where Madame and Monsieur sit and make out their (very reasonable) bills and count their gains. The hotel is still a most attractive retreat for a certain class of us, who like quiet and comfort without display. Rue de Beaune is a narrow little street leading off the Quai Voltaire, which runs parallel to the Seine. On the opposite shore of the river are the fine buildings of the Tuileries and the Louvre; between flows the steady stream, covered with little steamers, pleasure-boats, bateaux-mouches, tugs. The great Pont-Royal crosses the river, very near Rue de Beaune, to the Rue des Pyramides through the gardens of the Tuileries. It is one of the prettiest though not the gayest parts of Paris. The bridge and adjoining streets are crowded with life on foot and on omnibus; but take one step into Rue de Beaune, and you find silence, peace, and repose.

“In the winter of 1872-73 Mr. and Mrs. Lowell were living at this modest but well-known hotel, in its grandest apartments au premier. Somewhat dark and dingy even then, more so now, but neat and comfortable. The house must be very old. It is built round a little cour, or rather two little courts; and a winding staircase leads up through the principal part to the landings of the several stories. There were two parlors, if I remember, communicating. The walls were lined with bookcases, filled with Mr. Lowell’s books, and other furniture of the cosy, comfortable order, when they established themselves in these congenial quarters.

“Here they lived, read, wrote, talked, enjoyed themselves. Mr. Lowell was probably writing something of importance, but he had at that time no public or official business, no pressing engagements. He was, in fact, doing just what he pleased all the time. Of course his acquaintance was large in the American colony and among the best French society of Paris, but I do not think he troubled himself about it much. He delighted in prowling about the book-stalls which abound in the Quai Voltaire, where old rubbish in print is displayed along the parapet of the river in tempting openness, and where a real book-worm may rummage and find something really valuable among apparently hopeless stuff. He loved a quiet little dinner (in their rooms) À quatre, or, still better, À trois, where the food was good enough, and the talk excellent; his cigar came afterwards. Mrs. Lowell, his sympathetic and congenial companion, sat smiling and interested at such times, like the proper wife of a good talker, not talking much herself, but showing in her pleasant, refined face that she appreciated and enjoyed the fun. Although her health, even then, was delicate, she was strong enough to share his life and interests. What they both liked the most was the quiet of their own fireside, and the unmolested pursuit of literary pleasures, stimulated by all the resources of the great city, without any parade, or the burden of a crowd of engagements. They might have been any humdrum couple of small means, passing the winter in the most delightful city in the world, with all the resources in themselves of wit, intelligence, and mutual affection.”

While Lowell was in Europe, King Amadeo, the Italian sovereign of Spain, abdicated, and the republic of Castelar was born. Lowell was in Venice in November, 1873, at the time of the Virginius massacre. But he does not seem to have known, better than any others of his countrymen in Europe, how near we were to war with the Spanish republic. Yet in that month Mr. Fish had instructed Mr. Sickles to break off relations with the Spanish government unless they could reform their Cuban administration. “If Spain cannot redress these outrages, the United States will.” Such were the words in his telegram to Madrid of November 15, 1873.

Lowell had once and again visited his old friend William Story in his residence in Italy. The Storys had visited America in 1865. With Mrs. Lowell he now had an opportunity to visit them in Rome.

Since Mr. Story went to Rome with his wife in 1847 he had been devoting himself to sculpture, but he had never forgotten his American friends; and his light pen kept him in the memory of many of those who did not see his statues. His Cleopatra had won general approval. When the Lowells visited Rome in 1873 Story’s Alkestis was new, and Lowell writes of it with genuine pleasure. “It was so pleasant to be able to say frankly, ‘You have done something really fine, and which everybody will like.’ I wonder whether I shall ever give that pleasure to anybody.” This, observe, dear reader, as late as 1874.

Lowell returned to America in the summer of that year, arriving in Elmwood on the Fourth of July.

I myself do not believe that a long residence in Europe is of great help to an American gentleman or lady so far as an estimate of one’s own country goes. They are apt to read the London “Times’s” view of America, or that contained in Galignani’s newspaper, or possibly the Paris edition of the New York “Herald.” These utterances from day to day are not encouraging; but if they were true and adequate, one need not complain of discouragement. The truth is, however, that they are not adequate, and therefore they are not true. For one month when I was in Europe in 1873 the daily American dispatch in the “Times” was confined to the fortunes of some wretched Modoc Indians in California, who were hiding among their rocks and were being killed one by one by sharpshooters. For the rest there was practically nothing,—nothing which showed me that brave boys were growing into brave men, that good girls were growing into pure women, that universities and libraries and Chautauquas and summer schools were giving a liberal education to half my country, that merchants were telling the truth and acting the truth, and inventors were renewing the world.

I go a little out of the way to say this, because I observe that Mr. A. Lawrence Lowell, in his admirable notice of his cousin’s life, suggests that his stay in Europe in 1872-73 to a certain extent modified his notion with regard to America and American politics. Mr. A. Lawrence Lowell uses the following words:—

“During his stay in Europe Lowell had been distressed at the condition of politics in this country, and annoyed at the expressions of contempt for America it had called forth on the other side of the Atlantic. On his return he was horrified by the lack of indignation at corruption in public life, for the intense party feeling engendered by the war was still too strong to permit independent judgment in politics. He expressed his disgust in a couple of poems in ‘The Nation,’ called ‘The World’s Fair’ and ‘Tempora Mutantur.’ The verses were not of a high order of poetry, and at first one regrets that Hosea Biglow did not come out once more to do battle with the spoils system, as he had with the slave power long ago; but the subject was not one that made it possible. Among the archaic sculptures buried on the Acropolis after the sack of Athens by Xerxes, and recently unearthed, is a fragment of a pediment representing Hercules and the Hydra. The hero is on all fours alongside the monster in a cave, a fitting type of the way political corruption must be fought at the present day. The war with slavery, like that of Perseus with the dragon, could be waged on wings with a flashing sword; but the modern reformer must go down on his hands and knees and struggle with reptiles in the dark.”

Whether Lowell were right or wrong in thinking that a new wave of Philistinism had overwhelmed the administration of America is of no great importance to us here. I think he was wrong. I think that the American people govern America, and that the intrigues or devices of the men who “run with the machine” are of much less importance than very young people suppose, who read very poor though very conceited weekly newspapers. However that may be, this country has received great advantage from Lowell’s determined interference and interaction in our politics in the years which followed his return in 1874. So vigorous were his writings that he was at once recognized as a pure public leader. I have always found that the “machine” is eager to join hands with any man of literary, inventive, or business ability who is willing, as the phrase is, to “go into politics.” Certainly this was so in Lowell’s case, and in the autumn of 1876 he was asked to take a seat in Congress which we call in Massachusetts the South Middlesex seat. It was the seat which Edward Everett had captured years before, in the face of the machine of his time. It was the seat which William Everett afterwards captured, by fine audacity, although he was not even a resident in the district. Lowell might have gone to the Congress of 1877 if he had chosen. He declined the position, estimating correctly his abilities and inabilities as a member of a legislative body, “as it seems to me.” But, with the same desire to show that men of character and ability were interested in the Republican party, the nominating convention made him an elector for the presidency.

It was in the famous election after which Hayes was declared to be President by the electoral commission. I will say in passing that, as acting president of the New England Emigrant Aid Company, it had been my business to see to the transfer of two or three thousand voters from the North into Florida in the years after the rebellion, and that it was no matter of surprise to me, therefore, that the electoral commission pronounced that Florida had given a Republican vote. I believe Florida would give such a vote to-day, if there were any chance of its being counted.

When it was clear that the election of Mr. Hayes would depend on a single ballot in the electoral college, there were intriguers so mean as to suggest that possibly Mr. Lowell might be persuaded—I suppose by considerations which such men understand better than I do—to give a vote for Mr. Tilden. Any such hopes as these Mr. Lowell very promptly suppressed, as such a man can. That little correspondence, however, called attention to his name, even in the somewhat dark council chambers of the people who distrust “them littery fellers.”

Fortunately for America also, in all turns of our politics there has been the same sense of the value of literature and of the sphere of men of letters which has given the world about all the good diplomacy which the world has ever had. Somewhat as Franklin was sent to France because the French had heard of him before, quite as Motley was sent to Vienna because he knew something about history and could speak the language of Germany, exactly as Mr. Irving had been sent to Spain as our minister, the new administration made advances to Mr. Lowell to ask him if he would not represent us at one of the European courts.

The following notes may be published now, for the study of annalists, as most of the people who are referred to are dead:—

(April 13, 1876.) “What I meant to say was that if, when the Russian embassy was offered me, it had been the English instead, I should have hesitated before saying no. But with the salary cut down as it is now, I couldn’t afford to take it, for I could not support it decently.”

(April 19, 1876.) “I return Mr. Fish’s letter. There is no more chance of their sending me to St. James’s than to the moon, though I might not be unwilling to go. On the old salary I might manage, and it might do my health good. I have little doubt that it was offered to L. with the understanding that he would decline. I have not seen him for a few days. But it is too large a plum for anybody not ‘inside politics.’ It is the only mission where the vernacular sufficeth. Meanwhile, you will be amused to hear that I am getting inside politics after a fashion. I shall probably head the delegation from our ward to the state convention.”

Four foreign missions were offered him. He declined all, but in declining said, perhaps without much thought, that if they had offered him the mission to Spain, he would have gone. Mr. Evarts was Secretary of State, and it may readily be imagined that he was able “to manage it.” And so it was that this professor in Harvard College, who had kept his eyes so far open that he knew of the existence of Abraham Lincoln in 1860, was appointed to represent the United States in Spain.