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There are not many left of those who attended those first Lowell Lectures in the autumn of 1846 perhaps all the more taking for the broken English in which they were delivered and who shared in the delight with which, in a supplementary lecture, he more fluently addressed his audience in his mother-tongue.
Lowell presents it, does not assert that the visible lines are the actual canals, but only that they are strips of territory intersected, like Holland or the center of the plain of Lombardy, by innumerable irrigation canals and ditches. To construct such works is clearly not an impossible undertaking, although it does imply great industry and concentration of effort.
He lacked that restless technical curiosity which spurred Poe and Whitman to experiment with new forms. But Lowell revealed early extraordinary gifts of improvisation, retaining the old tunes of English verse as the basis for his own strains of unpremeditated art. He wrote "A Fable for Critics" faster than he could have written it in prose.
Charles Russell Lowell was in the class preceding mine; his father had been my father's classmate, and had done me many a favour; his mother was Mrs. Anna Jackson Lowell, one of the best and ablest Boston women of her time. In her house I had been a guest. Charles and James, the sons, were youths of the rarest intellectual gifts, each first scholar of his class, of whom the utmost was expected.
Lowell became the saint of Quincy Street, and none were so hardened or self-absorbed as not to do her reverence. But now the terrible past was eclipsed by the joy and pride of victory. The great heroic struggle was over; young men could look forward to the practice of peaceable professions, and old men had no longer to think of the exhausting drain upon their resources.
Any attempt to make that scanty surplus, by means of overflowing canals, travel across the equator into the opposite hemisphere, through such a terrible desert region and exposed to such a cloudless sky as Mr. Lowell describes, would be the work of a body of madmen rather than of intelligent beings.
The greater geniuses may have influenced those who came after them by their thoughts, by what they have contributed to the sum of human knowledge; but "they have not infected contemporaries or followers with mannerism." Then Lowell points out that "Dante, Shakspere, and Goethe, left no heirs either to the form or mode of their expression."
Women's wages, including all that they receive at the Lowell factories, average about 14s. a week, which is, I take it, fully a third more than women can earn in Manchester, or did earn before the loss of the American cotton began to tell upon them.
When the electors met at the Parker House in January, 1877, Lowell deposited his ballot for Hayes and Wheeler, and the slight applause that followed showed that his colleagues were conscious of the position he had assumed. When President Hayes appointed Lowell to be Minister to Spain, Lowell remarked that he did not see why it should have come to him.
"He praises a meditative life, and with evident sincerity: but we feel that he liked nothing so well as good talk." JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL: Walton. The inventor of the familiar maxim that "fishermen must not talk" is lost in the mists of antiquity, and well deserves his fate.
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