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.