Lowell landed in America again in June, 1885. It was nearly seven years since he left us on his way to Spain. And these were seven years which had changed, in a thousand regards, the conditions of his old American home.

In August, 1891, he died, seventy-two years old,—six years after this return. Of these years we have in his letters a record of pathetic interest, and every one who knew him and who loved him will say that of the seven decades of life—to which more than once he alludes—he never seemed more cheerful and companionable and cordial and wise than in the seventh. “And young,” he would often have said himself. He discusses old age and its coming in his letters to near friends,—yet perhaps more than is wise, certainly more than is necessary. But once and again he tells his correspondent that he is as young as a boy. He signs himself, in writing to Gilder, “Giacopo il Rigiovinato.” And he writes out:—

Passing along the Edgeware Road with a friend two years ago, their eyes were attracted by a sign with this inscription, “Hospital for Incurable Children.” Turning to his companion, with that genial smile for which he is remarkable, Lowell said quietly, “There’s where they’ll send me one of these days.”

But, all the same, seven years of Europe had changed Elmwood and Cambridge and Harvard College and New England and America and the world. In a way, of course, Lowell knew this as well as any man. He knew it better than most men knew it. And there were a good many sad things in his arrival, as there must be after seven years. So many deaths of old friends! So many changes in the daily life of the people around him! And he, almost without a vocation; obliged to establish his new avocations!

Some years before this, Mr. Lothrop Motley, in all the triumph of his well-earned success after the publication of his first volumes of history, came back to his old home—shall I say for a holiday? I do not know but that he meant to reside here. Not many months after he arrived, however, he told me, to my surprise, that he was going back to Europe. He was going to work in Holland on the archives again; to continue his great historical enterprise. I need not say that I expressed my regret that he was to leave us so soon. But he replied, almost sadly, that there was no place here in Boston for a man who was not at work: “You ought to hang out a long pendant from one of the forts in the harbor to the other, and write on it, ‘No admittance except on business.’” This was fatally true then of Boston; it is near the truth now.

And Lowell was no longer a diplomatist; nor had he any special abuses to reform; he had no regular lectures to deliver; he had no wife with whom to talk and read and make dinner linger long, and breakfast and lunch. He was in a changed world, and for that world had to prepare himself.

Perhaps it is as well to say that Boston also was changed; the Boston of 1885 was not the Boston of 1838. The late Mr. Amos Adams Lawrence said to me, not long before his death, that his father used to say that in the beginning of the century Boston was governed by the great national merchants: such men as “Billy Gray,” one of whose ships discovered the Columbia River; or as Colonel Perkins, who handled the trade of the East in the spirit in which a great artist composes a great picture; or as William Tudor, who supplied ice to the tropics, and when a winter failed him in New England, sent his schooners up into Baffin’s Bay to cut ice from the icebergs.

Mr. Lawrence said that when this sort of men gave up the government of Boston, it fell into the hands of the great mechanics: such men as developed the quarries at Quincy; as built Bunker Hill Monument, and in later days have built the Mechanics’ Hall, have united Boston with San Francisco and all the Pacific coast by rail. And then, he said, the government of Boston passed into the hands which hold it now,—into the hands of the distillers and brewers and retailers of liquor.

So far as the incident or accident of administration goes, this bitter satire is true; and it expresses one detail of the change between the Boston of the middle of this century and the Boston to which Lowell returned in June of 1885. Now, such a change affects social order; it affects conversation; in spite of you, it affects literature. Thus it affects philanthropy. The Boston of 1840 really believed that a visible City of God could be established here by the forces which it had at command. It was very hard in 1885 to make the Boston of that year believe any such thing.

But Lowell was no pessimist. He was proud of his home, and I think you would not have caught him in expressing in public any such contrast as I have ventured upon in these lines. On the other hand, the letters which Mr. Norton has published in his charming volumes confirm entirely the impression which Lowell’s old friends received from him: that he was glad, so glad, to be at home; that he had much to do in picking up his dropped stitches; and that he liked nothing better than to renew the old associations. It was, so to speak, unfortunate that he could not at once return to Elmwood. In fact, he did not establish himself there for three years. But, on the other hand, at Southborough, five-and-twenty miles from Boston, where he lived at the home of Mrs. Burnett, his daughter, he had a beautiful country around him, and, what was always a pleasure to him, the exploration of new scenery.

I asked a near friend of his if Lowell were the least bit wilted after his return. “Wilted? I should say not a bit. Bored? yes; worried, a little. But,” he added, as I should do myself, “the last talk I had with him, or rather listened to, I shall never forget.”

He spent the winter of 1889 in Boston with his dear sister, Mrs. Putnam, from whose recollections I was able to give the charming account which he furnished to us of his childhood for the first pages of this series. We have lost her from this world since those pages were first printed. And he was, of course, near his old friends and kindred: Dr. Holmes, John Holmes, all the Saturday Club, Dr. Howe, Charles Norton,—his intimate and tender friendship with whom was one of the great blessings of his life. These were all around him. But there was no Longfellow, no Appleton, no Emerson, no Agassiz, no Dana, no Page; Story was in Europe.

For occupation, he had just as many opportunities for public speaking as he chose to use. He had to prepare for the press the uniform edition of his works, both in prose and in poetry. It seems to me that he was too fastidious and rigid in this work. I think he left out a good deal which ought to have been preserved there. And this makes it certain that the little side-scraps which the newspapers preserved, or such as linger in some else forgotten magazine, will be regarded as among the treasures of collectors. More than that, many a boy and many a girl will owe to some such scraps inspirations which will last them through life. He occasionally published a poem, and occasionally delivered an address or lecture. But he took better care of himself than in the old days. There was no such crisis before the country as had engaged him then; and, in a way, it may be said that he enjoyed the literary leisure which he deserved.

I remember that on the first visit I made him after he was reËstablished at Elmwood, when I congratulated him because he was at home again, he said, with a smile still, “Yes, it is very nice to be here; but the old house is full of ghosts.” Of course it was. His father and mother were no longer living; Mrs. Burnett, who was with him there, was the only one of his children who had survived; and the circle of his brothers and sisters had been sadly diminished. He and his brother, Robert Lowell, died in the same year. Still, he was here with his own books; he had the old college library under his lee, and he had old friends close at hand. Once or twice in his letters of those days he goes into some review of his own literary endeavor. Certainly he had reason to be proud of it. Certainly he was not too proud; and I think he did have a feeling of satisfaction that his neighbors and his country appreciated the motive with which he had worked and the real success which he had attained.

As the great address at Birmingham sums up conveniently the political principles which governed his life, whether in literature or in diplomacy, so the address at the quarter-millennium celebration of Harvard College at Cambridge may be said to present a summary of such theories as he had formed on education, and of his hopes and his fears for the future of education. There are two or three aphorisms there which I think will be apt to be quoted fifty years hence, perhaps, as they are not quoted to-day. In the midst of a hundred or more of gentlemen who had served with him in the college he had the courage to say, “Harvard has as yet developed no great educator; for we imported Agassiz.”

On the 30th of April, 1889, there was a magnificent festival in the city of New York, at which he spoke. It is already forgotten by the people of that city and of the country, but at the moment it engaged universal attention. It was the celebration of the centennial of the establishment of the United States as a nation; the centennial of the birth of the Constitution; of the inauguration of Washington. It was, of course, the fit occasion for the expression of the people’s gratitude for the blessings which have followed on the establishment of the federal Constitution.

For this celebration the most admirable arrangements were made in New York by the committee which had taken the matter in hand. In the evening a banquet was served at the Metropolitan Opera-House, and many of the most distinguished speakers in the country had gladly accepted the invitation to be present. Among them Lowell naturally was one. But to those who listened, it seemed as if all these great men were in a sort awed by the greatness of the occasion. His address, perhaps because so carefully prepared, was for the purpose no better than any of the others. They could not help it. Every man who spoke was asking himself how his speech would read in the year 1989. There was no spontaneity; instead of it there was decorum and consideration, the determination to think wisely, and none of the eloquence which “belongs to the man and the occasion.” For hour after hour the patient stream of considerate commonplace flowed on, till at two in the morning the new President of the United States made the closing speech. The expectation of this address, and that alone, had held the great audience together. He was probably the only man who had not had a chance “to make any preparation.” He had gone through the day alive with the feeling of the day, drinking in its inspirations; and with such preparation as six hours at the dinner-table would give him, he rose to say what the day had taught him. He made one of the most magnificent addresses to which I have ever listened. He led with him from height to height an audience jaded and tired by the dignity of lawyers, the dexterity of politicians, and the commonplace of scholars. In fifteen minutes he had established his own reputation as a great public orator among the thousand men who were fortunate enough to hear him.

And yet, such is the satire of what we call history that, because the other speeches had been written out and could be sent to the journals,—because even a New York morning newspaper has to go to press at some time,—this absolutely extemporaneous speech of the one man who proved himself equal to the occasion did not get itself reported in any adequate form, and will never go down into history. There is, however, no danger that any of the other addresses of that great ceremonial will be read at the end of the hundred years.

His cousin says that Mr. Lowell was chiefly occupied by his addresses and other prose essays in the first years after his return, but that he wrote a few poems. Most of these will be found in the “Atlantic.” For the Lowell Institute he prepared a course of lectures on the old English dramatists, which have been published since his death. Of his addresses he printed but few, but the address on “The Independent in Politics,” which he delivered in 1888 before the New York Reform Club, was printed by that club.

Of his Cambridge life after his return to Elmwood his cousin writes: “The house was haunted by sad memories, but at least he was once more among his books. The library, which filled the two rooms on the ground floor to the left of the front door, had been constantly growing, and during his stay in Europe he had bought rare works with the intention of leaving them to Harvard College. Here he would sit when sad or unwell and read Calderon, the ’Nightingale in the Study,’ in whom he always found a solace. Except for occasional attacks of the gout, his life had been singularly free from sickness, but he had been at home only a few months when he was taken ill, and, after the struggle of a strong man to keep up as long as possible, he was forced to go to bed. In a few days his condition became so serious that the physicians feared he would not live; but he rallied, and, although too weak to go to England, as he had planned, he appeared to be comparatively well. When taken sick, he had been preparing a new edition of his works, the only full collection that had ever been made, and he had the satisfaction of publishing it soon after his recovery. This was the last literary work he was destined to do, and it rounded off fitly his career as a man of letters.”

Of these six years perhaps his friends remember his conversation most. Like other great men and good men, he did not insist on choosing the subject for conversation himself, but adapted himself to the wishes and notions of the people around him. His memory was so absolute, his fancy was so free, and his experience so wide that he seemed as much at home in one subject as in another. But when he had quite his own way among a circle of people more or less interested in books or literature, the talk was quite sure to drift round into some discussion of etymologies, of dialect, or of the change of habit which comes in as one or two centuries go by. And when his curiosity was once excited about a word—as I said when I was speaking of his talk with Mr. Murray—he would hold on to that word as a genealogist holds on to the biography of a great-grandmother of whom he only knows half the name. Here are one or two passages from notes which illustrate what I mean: “I used to know some about Pennsylvania Dutch, but forget their names.” “I wish I could have studied the Western lingo more, for it has colored our national speech most.” “I think perhaps W.P. Garrison might put you on the track of something about the Southern patois.”

“Pitch into the abuse of ‘will’ and ‘shall,’ ‘would’ and ‘should;’ when we were boys, no New Englander was capable of confounding them. I am expecting a statute saying that a murderer ‘will be hanged by the neck till he is dead.’ Alas the day!” And again, “Daddock I knew, but never met it alive; dodder, for a tree whose wood is beginning to grow pulpy with decay, I have heard, and the two words may be cousins. The latter, however, I believe to be a modern importation.” Murray and the dictionaries confirm his quick guess between the relation of one of these words to the other.

We have a fine American proverb, “Get the best.” In later years I have tried to make some Western State adopt it for its state seal. I have never seen it in any earlier use than in one of Lowell’s pleasant letters describing a canoe voyage in Maine; and I wrote to him rather late in his life to ask him if he were the inventor of the phrase. It has been adopted, as the reader may be apt to remember, by the authors of Webster’s Dictionary, and is a sort of trade-mark to their useful volumes. I am sorry to say that Lowell himself did not remember whether he had picked it up in conversation, or whether he coined it in its present form. For myself, I like to associate it with him.

I find, as I said, I am always reading with pleasure his estimate of his own work in the close of his life. It seems to me to be free from mock modesty on the one hand, as it is from vanity on the other. He seems to me to be as indifferent about style as I think a man ought to be. If a man knows he is well dressed, he had better not recall his last conversation with his tailor; he had better go and come and do his duty. Other people may say about the dress what they choose. In Lowell’s self-criticism, if one may call it so, you see the same frankness and unconsciousness, the same freedom from conceit of any kind, which you see in those early expressions which have been cited as illustrations of his boyhood and his youth. If he had said what he wanted to, he knew he had. If he had failed, he knew that. But it seemed to him almost of course that if a man knew what he wanted to say he should be able to say it.

One wishes that this unconsciousness of method could work itself into the minds of literary men more often and more thoroughly. Let a man eat his dinner and let him enjoy it, but do not let the guests discuss the difference between the taste of red pepper and of black pepper. It is as true in literature as everywhere else that the life is more than meat, and the body than raiment. There will probably be sophists and critics and fencing-masters and dancing-masters in all phases of society. They will certainly give much pleasure to each other, and perhaps they will give pleasure to the world; but it may be doubted whether they will be of much use to anybody. I suppose Grant enjoyed a dress parade when he saw it well done, but when they asked Grant how long it took to make a light infantryman, he said, “About half an hour.” Let us remember this as we listen, a little bored, to what people have to tell us about style.

There are some curious discussions as to the places and the duties of prose and of poetry; what you had better say in prose, what you had better say in verse. But I am disposed to think that such discussions with him were merely matters of amusement or possible speculation. Everybody who is really familiar with Lowell’s writing will remember many passages where the prose may be said to be the translation of his own poetry, or the poetry to be the translation of his own prose. And with such training as his, with such absolute command of language, with his accurate ear and perfect sense of rhythm, it would be of course that he should “lisp in numbers, for the numbers came.”

To the very end of his life, his conversation, and his daily walk indeed, were swayed by the extreme tenderness for the feelings of others which his sister noticed when he was a little boy. He would not give pain if he could help it. He would go so much more than halfway in trying to help the person who was next him that he would permit himself to be bored, really without knowing that he was bored. He would overestimate, as good men and great men will, the abilities of those with whom he had to do. So his geese were sometimes swans, as Mr. Emerson’s were, and those of other lovers of mankind.

His letters are never more interesting than in these closing years; and, as I have suggested, the fun of his conversation sparkled as brightly and happily as it ever did. Mr. Smalley, in an amusing passage, has described his ultra-Americanism in England. A pretty Englishwoman said, “Mr. Hawthorne has insulted us all by saying that all English women are fat; but while Mr. Lowell is in the room I do not dare say that all American women are lean.” When Lowell came home he would take pleasure in snubbing the Anglomaniacs who are sometimes found in New England, who want to show by their pronunciation or the choice of their words that they have crossed the ocean. I think that every one who is still living, of the little dinner-party where he tortured one of these younger men, will remember the fun of his attacks. This was one of the men whom you run against every now and then, who thought he must say “Brummagem” because Englishmen said so a hundred years ago; and on this occasion he was taking pains to pronounce the word “clerk” as if it rhymed with “lark,”—“as she is spoken in England, you know!” Lowell just pounced upon him as an eagle might pounce on a lark, to ask why he did so, why, if it were our fashion to pronounce the word “as she is spelled,” we might not do so, whether on the whole this were not the old pronunciation, and so on, and so on.

Never was anything more absurd than the idea which the Irish sympathizers took up, that a residence in London had spoiled his fondness for the old idioms and the other old home ways. Indeed, I think his stay in Southborough was specially pleasant to him because he learned in another part of Middlesex County how to renew some of those studies of “Early America” which he had begun before he knew in Cambridge.

As one turns over the volume of his letters, he finds traces of the fancies which shot themselves in a wayward fashion into his conversation. One of the fads of his later life was the taking up of the notion which we generally refer to Lord Beaconsfield, that almost everything remarkable in modern life may be traced back, later or earlier, to a Hebrew origin. He would discourse at length on the Hebrew traits in Browning, and he affected to have discovered the line of genealogy where, a century or two ago, a streak of the blood of Abraham came into the lines of the Brownings. He was quite sure—I am sorry to say I have forgotten how—that he had a line of Jewish blood himself, a line which he could trace out somewhere this side of the times of Ivanhoe. Then there was the hereditary descent of his mother’s family from the Hebrides, which has been referred to. The Spences were of Traill origin,—his brother Robert carried the Traill name. And Lowell liked to think that he had in his make-up something of the element which in a Lochiel you would call second-sight. Sometimes he alludes to that in his letters; he has only to shut his eyes, he says, and he can see all the people whom he has known, whom he wants to see, and carry on his conversation with them. I have already said that when I painfully worked through the poems of James Russell, our James Russell’s great-grandfather, rendering that homage to the shade of that poet which no one else has rendered for a hundred years, I had to remind myself that he, alas! had no second-sight, and that he differed from his great-grandson precisely in this, that he was not of Norna’s blood and could not work Norna’s miracles.

One of the men of letters whose impressions of such a life every one is glad to read writes to me of Lowell’s work: “Mr. Lowell excelled at once in original and critical work, thus giving the lie to the sneer that a critic is a person who has failed as a creator. Both as a poet and an essayist he revealed himself as a genuine cosmopolitan. He had the wisdom of the scholar and the horse sense of the man of the world. He was equally at home in the splendid realm of the imagination and in the prosaic domain of hard facts; and it may be said of him, as Macaulay said of Bunyan, that he gave to the abstract the interest of the concrete. As a satirist and humorist he produced in the ‘Biglow Papers’ a work which is unique in our literature. He was not given to moralizing; his was as far as possible from being a dull didactic brain; but all to which he put his pen was wholesome and in the best sense stimulating, free from morbidness and that pessimism of

who declared that

In one of Lowell’s letters written to England after his return he says that in America they had invented a new torture while he was away, in the shape of calling upon authors to read their own works aloud for the benefit of charities. I am always grateful to this form of torture when it brings as agreeable compensation as I remember on an occasion when we were both reading, I think, for the pleasure of an audience which had contributed to the purchase of the Longfellow Park at Cambridge. For this gave me the pleasure of talking to Lowell for the two hours while the “entertainment” lasted, as we sat upon the stage in the Boston Museum. It is rather a curious thing, to a person as little used to a stage as I am, to find how wholly the footlights separate you, not simply from the personal touch of the people in the audience, but from them, until it comes to be your turn to address them. Even at a public dinner, when you sit by some agreeable person, you have not exactly the chance for conversation with him which you have when both of you are in mediÆval chairs dug out from the property-room, and reading is going on quite in front of you which you may attend to or not, as you both choose. Of course the fortune of a charity was made, if Lowell were willing to read poetry or prose which he had written.

As the reader remembers, he lectured again in Boston in one or two full courses to large audiences at the Lowell Institute. He did not absolutely refuse calls from distant cities, but I think traveling became somewhat a burden to him, and after he was once in Elmwood, the associations of the old books and the old life were so pleasant that it was more difficult to draw him away from home.

For his summer holiday, however, he could run across the ocean and visit his English friends in the country, or go back to his pleasant Whitby surroundings. Whitby had for him a particular charm, and one really wishes that he had been in the mood at some time to make a monograph on Whitby, so interesting are some of the references which he makes to it in his letters.

“I am really at Whitby, whither I have been every summer but 1885 for the last six years. This will tell you how much I like it. A very primitive place it is, and the manners and ways of its people much like those of New England. The people with whom I lodge, but for accent, might be of Ashfield. It is a wonderfully picturesque place, with the bleaching bones of its Abbey standing aloof on the bluff and dominating the country for leagues. Once, they say, the monks were lords as far as they could see. The skeleton of the Abbey still lords it over the landscape, which was certainly one of the richest possessions they had, for there never was finer. Sea and moor, hill and dale; sea dotted with purple sails and white (fancy mixes a little in the purple, perhaps); moors flushed with heather in blossom, and fields yellow with corn, and the dark heaps of trees in every valley blabbing the secret of the stream that fain would hide to escape being the drudge of man.”

We shall find this “hiding of the stream” again. “I know not why wind has replaced water for grinding; and the huge water-wheels green with moss and motionless give one a sense of repose after toil that to a lazy man like me is full of comfort.” “I wish you could see the ‘yards,’ steep flights of stone steps hurrying down from the west cliff and the east, between which the river whose name I can never remember crawls into the sea.” The river is the Esk River, but not that which Lochinvar swam where “ford there was none.”

A year afterwards Lowell writes from Whitby: “I am rather lame to-day, because I walked too much and over very rough paths yesterday. But how could I help it? For I will not give in to old age. The clouds were hanging ominously in the northwest, and soon it began to rain in a haphazard kind of way, as a musician who lodges over one lets his fingers idle among the keys before he settles down to the serious business of torture. So it went on drowsily, but with telling effects of damp, till we reached Falling Foss, which we saw as a sketch in water-colors, and which was very pretty.

“Thunderstorms loitered about over the valley like ’Arries on a Bank Holiday, at a loss what to do with their leisure, but ducking us now and then by way of showing their good humor. However, there were parentheses of sunshine, and on the whole it was very beautiful.”

Again, the next year, in 1889, he says: “I was received with enthusiasm by the Misses Galilee, the landladies; they vow they will never let my rooms so long as there is any chance of my coming. I like it as much as ever. I never weary of the view from my window; the Abbey says to me, ‘The best of us get a little shaky at last, and there get to be gaps in our walls.’ And then the churchyard adds, ‘But you have no notion what good beds there are at my inn—.’ The mill runs no longer, but the stream does, down through a leafy gorge in little cascades and swirls and quiet pools with skyscapes in them, and seems happy in its holiday.” We shall come to this “happy holiday” again. Will the reader observe that it is of a series of summers spent in this charming retirement at Whitby, that we hear people speak who talk of his summers in England as if the grand society he had met there had spoiled him for America.

One cannot read Lowell for five minutes without seeing how large his life was, and how little he was fettered by the commonplace gyves of space or time or flesh or sense. He never preaches as Dr. Young would do, or Mr. Tupper, or Satan Montgomery. But, all the same, he is living in the larger life, and so are you if he calls you into his company. Writing to Miss Norton, he says:—

“I don’t care where the notion of immortality came from.... It is there, and I mean to hold it fast. Suppose we don’t know. How much do we know, after all?... The last time I was ill, I lost all consciousness of my flesh. I was dispersed through space in some inconceivable fashion and mixed with the Milky Way.... Yet the very fact that I had a confused consciousness all the while of the Milky Way as something to be mingled with, proved that I was there as much an individual as ever.

“There is something in the flesh that is superior to the flesh, something that can in finer moments abolish matter and pain. And it is to this we must cling....

“... I think the evolutionists will have to make a fetich of their protoplasm before long. Such a mush seems to me a poor substitute for the rock of ages, by which I understand a certain set of higher instincts which mankind have found solid under all weathers.”

If I am writing for those who have read Lowell carefully and loyally, they know that he knew that “the human race is the individual of which different men and women are separate cells or organs.” They know that he knew that “honor, truth, and justice are not provincialisms of this little world,” but belong to the life and language of the universe. They know that he knew that he belonged to the universe and was the infinite child of the infinite God. He says sometimes in joke that he hates to go to church. I am afraid that most men who could preach as well as he would say the same thing with the chances of the ordinary religious service. But he also says, “If Dr. Donne or Jeremy Taylor, or even Dr. South, were the preacher, perhaps”—

As it happens, I recollect no expressions of his more enthusiastic than those in which he described public services of religion. His mother had belonged to the Church of England, and his love for the Prayer Book was associated with his earliest recollections of her.

For the rest, I am sure I should be most sorry to have any one think that a man of his large, religious nature, who lived in the eternities, could be satisfied with the average ecclesiastical function of to-day.

It was a disappointment to him that his health forbade one more visit to his dear Whitby, which he had proposed for the summer of 1890. On the last day of his last visit there, as I suppose, he wrote the beautiful poem, not so well known as it should be, with which I will close this series of reminiscences. He wrote it happily, and he liked it.

It begins with a gay description of the flow and joyous dash of young life. As time passes on, the lively brook is held back by dams sometimes; it is set to work to feed mankind, or to help men somehow; it is pent in and almost prisoned. But not for always. Why should not his brook burst its bonds and leap and plash and sparkle as happily as when it was born?

I print this poem because the circumstances of its composition and publication prevented its insertion in what are generally spoken of as the complete editions edited by himself. He says to his daughter, in speaking of it, “A poem got itself written at Whitby which seems to be not altogether bad; and this intense activity of the brain has the same effect as exercise on my body, and somehow braces up the whole machine.” It is a pleasure to feel that he read this beautiful poem himself with something of the satisfaction which every one will find in it. And it is impossible that it should not suggest the conditions of his own closing life. “My Brook,” he calls it. And one need not run back to the memories of “Beaver Brook” to fancy the walk or the ride in which some mountain brook in the North Riding renewed the old Cambridge experiences. The charming brook of his youth, gay and joyous, had passed through one and another channel of hard work and of close discipline; but, as he says, there was no reason why, as he and his brook came nearer to the ocean, there should not be the same joy and freedom that there was when he and his brook began on life.

Just after he had written this charming poem—better than that, just when he liked it—it happened that he received an earnest request from that excellent friend of literature, Mr. Robert Bonner, asking him to send something which he might print. On the impulse of the moment Lowell sent this poem. Mr. Bonner kept it for illustration. He illustrated it beautifully, and it appeared before the world fifteen months after, at Christmas of the year 1890, in the New York “Ledger.” By the courtesy of Mr. Bonner’s sons, I am able to print it all—as the fit close of these papers. I could not otherwise have given so charming a review by the poet of his own life and his eternal hopes.

And so “my brook” passes into the ocean.