you; but he did not wish you to be more of his mind than he was himself.  In one of those squalid Irish neighborhoods I confessed a grudge (a mean and cruel grudge, I now think it) for the increasing presence of that race among us, but this did not please him; and I am sure that whatever misgiving he had as to the future of America, he would not have had it less than it had been the refuge and opportunity of the poor of any race or color.  Yet he would not have had it this alone.  There was a line in his poem on Agassiz which he left out of the printed version, at the fervent entreaty of his friends, as saying too bitterly his disappointment with his country.  Writing at the distance of Europe, and with America in the perspective which the alien environment clouded, he spoke of her as “The Land of Broken Promise.”  It was a splendid reproach, but perhaps too dramatic to bear the full test of analysis, and yet it had the truth in it, and might, I think, have usefully stood, to the end of making people think.  Undoubtedly it expressed his sense of the case, and in the same measure it would now express that of many who love their country most among us.  It is well to hold one’s country to her promises, and if there are any who think she is forgetting them it is their duty to say so, even to the point of bitter accusation.  I do not suppose it was the “common man” of Lincoln’s dream that Lowell thought America was unfaithful to, though as I have suggested he could be tender of the common man’s hopes in her; but he was impeaching in that blotted line her sincerity with the uncommon man:  the man who had expected of her a constancy to the ideals of her youth end to the high martyr-moods of the war which had given an unguarded and bewildering freedom to a race of slaves.  He was thinking of the shame of our municipal corruptions, the debased quality of our national statesmanship, the decadence of our whole civic tone, rather than of the increasing disabilities of the hard-working poor, though his heart when he thought of them was with them, too, as it was in “the time when the slave would not let him sleep.”

He spoke very rarely of those times, perhaps because their political and social associations were so knit up with the saddest and tenderest personal memories, which it was still anguish to touch.  Not only was he

                  “—­not of the race
        That hawk, their sorrows in the market place,”

but so far as my witness went he shrank from mention of them.  I do not remember hearing him speak of the young wife who influenced him so potently at the most vital moment, and turned him from his whole scholarly and aristocratic tradition to an impassioned championship of the oppressed; and he never spoke of the children he had lost.  I recall but one allusion to the days when he was fighting the anti-slavery battle along the whole line, and this was with a humorous relish of his Irish servant’s disgust in having to wait upon a negro whom he had asked to his table.