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Updated: June 21, 2025
Another eminent American who often honored my quiet home at Oxford was James Russell Lowell, for a long time United States minister in England. He was a professor and at the same time a politician and a man of the world. Lowell's conversation was inexhaustible, his information astonishing.
It is best to find that all men are of the same make, and that there are certain universal things which interest them as much as the supernal things, and amuse them even more. There was a saying of Lowell's which he was fond of repeating at the menace of any form of the transcendental, and he liked to warn himself and others with his homely, "Remember the dinner-bell."
I recalled my morning's visit to Whittier at Oak Knoll, in Danvers, a little more than a year ago, when he led me to one of his favorites, an aspiring evergreen which shot up like a flame. I thought of the graceful American elms in front of Longfellow's house and the sturdy English elms that stand in front of Lowell's.
Charles Eliot Norton, the editor of Lowell's "Letters," says it "left its projectors burdened with a considerable debt." That Poesy, save as she can soar nearer to the blissful throne of the Supreme Beauty, is of no more use than all other beautiful things are, we are fain to grant.
Here is a little wooden mallet, with a loose tiny ball fitted into a socket at the end of the handle. This is for the baby to suck. On either end of the head of the mallet is painted the mystic tomoye that Chinese symbol, resembling two huge commas so united as to make a perfect circle, which you may have seen on the title-page of Mr. Lowell's beautiful Soul of the Far East.
Sometimes he was a mere guesser, not a clairvoyant. We have had only one Coleridge. Lowell's essay on Wordsworth is not as illuminating as Walter Pater's. The essay on Gray is not as well ordered as Arnold's. The essay on Thoreau is quite as unsatisfactory as Stevenson's.
Mr. Oliphant is what many of us call a mystic, and I found a singular pleasure in listening to him. This dinner at Mr. Lowell's was a very remarkable one for the men it brought together, and I remember it with peculiar interest. My entertainer holds a master-key to London society, and he opened the gate for me into one of its choicest preserves on that evening.
In fact, it would be possible to write the story of our Peloponnesian war in phrases of Thucydides, and I should not be surprised if such a task were a regular school exercise at Eton or at Rugby. Why, it was but the other day that Professor Tyrrell, of Dublin, translated a passage from Lowell's Biglow Papers into choice Aristophanese.
A thought has the force of a deed, and there is a literal truth in the line, "The good, though only thought, has life and breath;" and in Lowell's words: "Ah! let us hope that to our praise Good God not only reckons The moments when we tread His ways, But when the spirit beckons." The thought-life is, indeed, the most real of the two lives, and dominates the other.
No Hills upon Mars. The special point to which I here wish to call attention is this. Mr. Lowell's main contention is, that the surface of Mars is wonderfully smooth and level. Not only are there no mountains, but there are no hills or valleys or plateaux.
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