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Men go into jail, not because they steal, but because they did not steal enough. Again: excessive fashion makes people unnatural and untrue. It is a factory from which has come forth more hollow pretences, and unmeaning flatteries, and hypocrisies, than the Lowell Mills ever turned out shawls and garments. Fashion is the greatest of all liars. It has made society insincere.

When the first gun was fired on Fort Sumter, the cause of the slave and of the despised Abolitionists became the cause of all. Then could be felt the force of the sentiment which long before had won the pitying muse of Longfellow, which had inspired the strains of Lowell, and which had led the Quaker Whittier minstrel and prophet at once into the thick of the strife.

But it happens that Lowell stands with both Emerson and Whitman in the very centre of that group of poets and prose-men who have been inspired by the American idea. They were all, as we say proudly nowadays, "in the service," and the particular rank they may have chanced to win is a relatively insignificant question, except to critics and historians.

Bringing a gift of pungent prose to the service of a poetic imagination, Emerson startled the decorously dignified authorities of the New England pulpit; he 'saved us, says Lowell, 'from the body of this death. He pointed from the record of miracles past to an ever-present miracle.

Lowell owned the brilliancy and uncommonness of Harte's gift, while he sumptuously surfeited his passion of finding everybody more or less a Jew by finding that Harte was at least half a Jew on his father's side; he had long contended for the Hebraicism of his name.

There were a number of stone bridges, and a dozen dams on the river; stages communicated daily with Boston, Keene, and Lowell, and left three times a week for Worcester and Springfield, and returned on alternate days.

Isaac Wiltse, the Pastor at Berlin at this time entered the Wisconsin Conference at its April session in 1859. His charges before coming to Berlin were Wautoma, Kingston, Door Creek, Lowell, Liberty Prairie, and Dartford. Since leaving Berlin, his appointment has been Beaver Dam, where he is now doing a good work for the Master.

Only twenty-seven years of age, he was treated on an equality by men ten to fifteen years his senior; and he proved himself equal to their expectations. No American except Lowell has ever made such a favorable impression in England as Sumner; but this happened in Sumner's youth, while Lowell in his earlier visits attracted little attention.

It is true that Thoreau imitated Emerson's manner of speech a good deal and it was often difficult to avoid doing this while in Emerson's company but Lowell also in his younger days affected a grave and reserved demeanor which he afterwards became tired of and threw entirely aside.

One night after dinner I quoted for Harding the following sentence from an address by President Lowell of Harvard: "The most painful defect in the American College at the present time is the lack of esteem for excellence in scholarship."