The third magnate of our Club was Lowell, with whose personality the world at large is already well acquainted.  In his own day and presence it was impossible to form a satisfactory personal judgment of him, and even now, through the perspective of the years since he died, it is out of the question for me to pronounce a dispassionate judgment.  Of all that New England world, so hospitable, so brotherly to me that if I had been born in Cambridge it could hardly have been more kind, Lowell and Norton were those who most made my welcome free from any embarrassment to myself.  Norton, almost exactly my contemporary, is still living, and which of us two shall say the last word for the other is in the lap of the gods, but in the Adirondack Club life he does not appear.  No kinder or wiser friend have I ever had.  Himself the son of one of the most distinguished of the great Unitarian leaders of liberal New England, his broad, common-sense views of sectarian questions first widened my religious horizon, emancipated me from the tithes of mint and cummin, and helped me to see the value of observances, and his hand was always held out to me in those straitened moments in which my impulsive and ill-regulated manner of life continually landed me.  I shall not disturb the serenity of his old age by the indiscreet garrulity of mine.  But the brotherhood between him and Lowell brought our lives together, and Lowell was the pole to which both our needles swung.  Norton’s delicate health made it impossible for him to take part in the excursions made by the Club, though he was enrolled as a member.

Of Lowell much has been said by many people, some of whom were less, and others, perhaps, better acquainted with him than I was, but of him I can speak at least without restraint, other than that which love and gratitude impose.  And to-day, more than forty years since I found his friendship what it ever remained, the judgment I formed of him at first acquaintance comes up again in one point dominant.  He seemed to me a man whom good fortune, and especially the favor of society, had prevented from filling the role that fate had intended for him.  There was in not a few of his poems the promise of reaching a height which was attainable only to a man who climbs light.  There was in him the possible making of a great reformer, an evangelist, which possibility never became actuality, owing to the weight which social success laid on him.

All through his early poems runs the thread of a fine morality, the perception of the highest obligations of religion and philanthropy, the subtle distinction of the purest Christianity, the defense of the weak and oppressed, the succor of the poor; in fine, the creed of a practical religion which required its adherent to go into the slums and out on the highways to carry out his convictions in acts.  In the warfare he waged on slavery when the anti-slavery cause was very unpopular, and, in the case of Garrison and others, brought on its advocates continual danger and occasional violence, Lowell was unsparing in the denunciation of the national sin; but whether because the anti-abolition public which ruled Boston thought denunciation in form of verse had no practical value, or because the personal fascination the man always exercised on all around him was such as to disarm hostility, it happened that he was never made the object of aggression.