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IMMORTALITY

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How long shall we sit in our porticoes practising idle and musty virtues, which any work would make impertinent? As if one were to begin the day with long-suffering, and hire a man to hoe his potatoes; and in the afternoon go forth to practise Christian meekness and charity with goodness aforethought! Consider the China pride and stagnant self-complacency of mankind. This generation inclines a little to congratulate itself on being the last of an illustrious line; and in Boston and London and Paris and Rome, thinking of its long descent, it speaks of its progress in art and science and literature with satisfaction. There are the Records of the Philosophical Societies, and the public Eulogies of Great Men! It is the good Adam contemplating his own virtue. "Yes, we have done great deeds, and sung divine songs, which shall never die," - that is, as long as we can remember them. The learned societies and great men of Assyria, where are they? What youthful philosophers and experimentalists we are! There is not one of my readers who has yet lived a whole human life. These may be but the spring months in the life of the race. If we have had the seven years' itch, we have not seen the seventeen-year locust yet in Concord. We are acquainted with a mere pellicle of the globe on which we live. Most have not delved six feet beneath the surface, nor leaped as many above it. We know not where we are. Beside, we are sound asleep nearly half our time. Yet we esteem ourselves wise, and have an established order on the surface. Truly, we are deep thinkers, we are ambitious spirits! As I stand over the insect crawling amid the pine needles on the forest floor, and endeavoring to conceal itself from my sight, and ask myself why it will cherish those humble thoughts, and hide its head from me who might, perhaps, be its benefactor, and impart to its race some cheering information, I am reminded of the greater Benefactor and Intelligence that stands over me the human insect.

There is an incessant influx of novelty into the world, and yet we tolerate incredible dulness. I need only suggest what kind of sermons are still listened to in the most enlightened

countries. There are such words as joy and sorrow, but they are only the burden of a psalm, sung with a nasal twang, while we believe in the ordinary and mean. We think that we can change our clothes only. It is said that the British Empire is very large and respectable, and that the United States are a first-rate power. We do not believe that a tide rises and falls behind every man which can float the British Empire like a chip, if he should ever harbor it in his mind. Who knows what sort of seventeen-year locust will next come out of the ground? The government of the world I live in was not framed, like that of Britain, in afterdinner conversations over the wine.

The life in us is like the water in the river. It may rise this year higher than man has ever known it, and flood the parched uplands; even this may be the eventful year, which will drown out all our muskrats. It was not always dry land where we dwell. I see far inland the banks which the stream anciently washed, before science began to record its freshets. Every one has heard the story which has gone the rounds of New England, of a strong and beautiful bug which came out of the dry leaf of an old table of apple-tree wood, which had stood in a farmer's kitchen for sixty years, first in Connecticut, and afterward in Massachusetts, from an egg deposited in the living tree many years earlier still, as appeared by counting the annual layers beyond it; which was heard gnawing out for several weeks, hatched perchance by the heat of an urn. Who does not feel his faith in a resurrection and immortality strengthened by hearing of this? Who knows what beautiful and winged life, whose egg has been buried for ages under many concentric layers of woodenness in the dead dry life of society, deposited at first in the alburnum of the green and living tree, which has been gradually converted into the semblance of its well-seasoned tomb, — heard perchance gnawing out now for years by the astonished family of man, as they sat round the festive board, - may unexpectedly come forth from amidst society's most trivial and handselled furniture, to enjoy its perfect summer life at last!

[From Walden, "Conclusion."]

JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL

[James Russell Lowell was born in the Lowell homestead, Elmwood, in Cambridge, Mass., Feb. 22, 1819, and died there Aug. 12, 1891. He came from a distinguished New England family. He was educated at Harvard College, where he graduated in 1838. On leaving college he began the study of law and was admitted to the bar in 1840, but never practised his profession. Genius and taste alike turned him to literature. In 1843 he was the editor and one of the founders of the short-lived periodical, The Pioneer, which took a higher stand than any magazine of the time. He contributed to other periodicals, but he became widely known in 1848 through the ringing satire of the Biglow Papers, in which his convictions of the wrong of slavery and the crime of the Mexican War found ardent and effective expression; and also by his Fable for Critics and Sir Launfal. In 1851 he made his first visit to Europe, and in 1855, after his appointment to succeed Longfellow as Smith professor of the French and Spanish languages and literatures and of belles-lettres at Harvard College, a second visit of several years, during which he laid the foundations of his wide knowledge of the Romance languages and literatures. For twenty years his time was absorbed by his academic duties, by his share in the editorship of the Atlantic Monthly (1857), and the North American Review (1863-72), and by the writing of many of his best essays. In 1872, however, he again spent a year in Europe, and in 1877 he virtually severed his connections with Harvard College by his acceptance of an appointment as minister to Spain. In 1880 he was transferred to England, where he served until 1885. In 1887 he paid a last visit to England. Oxford conferred on him the degree of D.C.L. in 1873, and Cambridge that of LL.D. in 1874. Lowell served his country well, not only as a diplomat, an editor, a patriot poet, and an essayist, but as a teacher, and through his continuation at Harvard College of the studies in European languages and literatures begun by Ticknor and Longfellow, the cause of learning and culture throughout the land received a distinct impetus.

Much of Lowell's best work in prose was contributed to various periodicals. The names and dates of the volumes containing his published prose work are as follows: Conversations on Some of the Old Poets (1845), Fireside Travels (1864), Among my Books (first series, 1870; second series, 1876), My Study Windows (1871), Democracy and Other Addresses (1886), Political Essays (1888), Latest Literary Essays and Addresses (1891), The Old English Dramatists (1892). His Letters, edited by C. E. Norton, appeared in 1883.]

AMONG American men of letters Lowell stands conspicuous alike for variety of natural gift and breadth of culture. Poet, wit, humorist, scholar, critic, essayist, professor, diplomatist, in each capacity he exhibited an excellence which served as warrant that had he limited himself to a single art, he might easily have attained to the highest distinction in its pursuit. But the very multiplicity of his endowments interfered with the complete expression of any one of them. His talents hampered his genius. A lifetime is long enough for most men to make full use of their possessions. But so ample were his resources that he seemed to need a secular term in which to fulfil the service which they were capable of rendering. In all that he did he was troubled, not by lack but by superfluity of means. Masterly as was his performance in many fields, his seventy years were but as a long youth, a period of preparation for the completely disciplined exercise of his natural powers. He was never content with his own achievements, but, with unexhausted ardor and unwearied industry, he continued to the end of life preparing himself for the work in which his genius should exhibit the full sweep of its wing.

Yet in his poetry and in his prose, however much there may be that is deciduous, there is much of perennial quality which "gives it a title to rank as literature in the highest sense." His best work is replete with an undying vitality; it is the expression of a spirit of perpetual contemporaneousness. His own words in speaking of the classics are largely applicable to himself: "Their vitality is the vitality not of one or another blood or tongue, but of human nature; their truth is not topical and transitory, but of universal acceptation; and thus all great authors seem the coevals not only of each other, but of whoever reads them, growing wiser with him as he grows wise, and unlocking to him one secret after another as his own life and experience give him the key, but on no other condition. Their meaning is absolute, not conditional; it is a property of theirs quite irrespective of manners or creed; for the highest culture, the development of the individual by observation, reflection, and study leads to one result, whether in Athens or in London or on the banks of the Charles.

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Lowell was fortunate in his birth and his early training. The time was the happiest period of the historic life of New England. The

community was one in which homogeneousness of blood, common traditions, simplicity of customs, wide diffusion of comfort and of culture, an unusual equality of condition, a general disposition to individual independence and mutual reliance, all combined to promote a spirit of hopefulness, confidence, and sympathy, such as has rarely existed among men. For a youth of genius it was a fortunate society in which he grew up. There were few adventitious difficulties to be struggled with; there was little to pervert the natural course of his powers; there was learning enough to be had for their due cultivation; the moral atmosphere was healthy. The influence of such conditions is manifest not only in Lowell's writings, but in those of his contemporaries as well it gave its quality to the wisdom of Emerson, to the poetry of Longfellow; and, in the work of these and other men their fellows, the salutary influence is perpetuated for the benefit of later generations. These men in their writings, and in their lives, gave expression and form to the true ideals of American democracy.

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The first of Lowell's prose works, Conversations on Some of the Old Poets, was published in 1845, when he was but twenty-six years old, “standing as yet only in the outer porch of life." Alike in substance and in form it exhibits the youthfulness of its author, but it is the work of a youth already capable of such things as betoken great achievements to come. There is in it the evidence of native force of mind, of poetic temperament, of imaginative insight and critical discrimination, as well as of wide reading and capacity of so assimilating the thought of others as to make it the nutriment of originality of genius. But there is also in it something of the perfervid zeal of youth, its disposition to rhetorical exuberance, its exclusiveness of taste, and its subjection to the influences of favorite writers. Lowell rapidly outgrew these defects, they became distasteful to him, and in later years he refrained from reprinting the little book which, in spite of its containing much that remained characteristic of its author, was the work of a writer different in some important respects from what he had become. In the Address to the Reader with which it begins there is, however, a passage which is of interest in its bearing on the whole of Lowell's literary work. "For the minor faults of the book," said the young author, "the hurry with which it has been prepared must

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