of letters--judicious, judicial, disinterested, patient, happy,
temperate, delighted. The colonial days, with the 'painful' divines who
brought the parish into the wilderness; the experimental period of
ambition and attempts at a literature that should be young as the soil
and much younger than the race; the civil-war years, with a literature
that matched the self-conscious and inexpert heroism of the army;--none
of these periods of the national life could fitly be represented by a man
of letters. And though James Russell Lowell was the contemporary of the
'transcendentalists,' and a man of middle age when the South seceded, and
though indeed his fame as a Yankee humourist is to be discerned through
the smoke and the dust, through the gravity and the burlesque, of the
war, clear upon the other side, yet he was virtually the child of
national leisure, of moderation and education, an American of the
seventies and onwards. He represented the little-recognised fact that in
ripeness, not in rawness, consists the excellence of Americans--an
excellence they must be content to share with contemporary nations,
however much it may cost them to abandon we know not what bounding
ambitions which they have never succeeded in definitely describing in
words. Mr. Lowell was a refutation of the fallacy that an American can
never be American enough. He ranked with the students and the critics
among all nations, and nothing marks his transatlantic conditions except,
perhaps, that his scholarliness is a little anxious and would not seem
so; he enriches his phrases busily, and yet would seem composed; he makes
his allusions tread closely one upon another, and there is an assumed
carelessness, and an ill-concealed vigilance, as to the effect their
number and their erudition will produce upon the reader. The American
sensitiveness takes with him that pleasantest of forms; his style
confesses more than he thinks of the loveable weakness of national
vanity, and asks of the stranger now and again, 'Well, what do you think
of my country?'