The indescribable innocence and beneficence of nature-of sun and wind and rain, of summer and winter-such health, such cheer, they afford forever! and such sympathy have they ever with our race, that all nature would be affected, and the sun's brightness fade, and the winds would sigh humanely, and the clouds rain tears, and the woods shed their leaves and put on mourning in midsummer, if any man should ever for a just cause grieve. Shall I not have intelligence with the earth? Am I not partly leaves and vegetable mould myself? What is the pill which will keep us well, serene, contented? Not my or thy great-grandfather's, but our great-grandmother nature's universal, vegetable, botanic medicines, by which she has kept herself young always, outlived so many old Parrs in her day, and fed her health with their decaying fatness. For my panacea, instead of one of those quack vials of a mixture dipped from Acheron and the Dead Sea, which come out of those long shallow black schooner-looking wagons which we sometimes see made to carry bottles, let me have a draught of undiluted morning air. Morning air! If men will not drink of this at the fountain-head of the day, why, then, we must even bottle up some and sell it in the shops, for the benefit of those who have lost their subscription ticket to morning time in this world. But remember, it will not keep quite till noonday even in the coolest cellar, but drive out the stopples long ere that and follow westward the steps of Aurora. I am no worshipper of Hygeia, who was the daughter of that old herb-doctor Esculapius, and who is represented on monuments holding a serpent in one hand, and in the other a cup out of which the serpent sometimes drinks; but rather of Hebe, cupbearer to Jupiter, who was the daughter of Juno and wild lettuce, and who had the power of restoring gods and men to the vigor of youth. She was probably the only thoroughly sound-conditioned, healthy, and robust young lady that ever walked the globe, and wherever she came it was spring. JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL 1819-1891 Cambridge, inseparably associated with the names of so many of America's men of letters, was the birthplace and, during the greater part of his splendid career, the home of James Russell Lowell. Born in 1819, he was sent to one of the private schools in his native town, and then to Harvard, where he graduated in 1838. Two years later he was admitted to the bar, but never practised, devoting himself almost exclusively to the pursuit of literature. His first volume of poems was published in 1841, the collection containing many verses that he afterwards suppressed. Three years later he married, and went to live at "Elmwood," the beautiful house where he was born. The same year appeared A Legend of Brittany," one of the most admired of his poems. In 1848 he published "A Fable for Critics," one of the wittiest of literary satires, and also issued in book form the first series of the powerful" Biglow Papers," denouncing the Mexican War. These vigorous poems in the Yankee dialect and bristling with Yankee humor and common-sense remain a noteworthy contribution to American literature. 66 In 1854 Lowell accepted the professorship of modern languages at Harvard made vacant by the resignation of Longfellow, and after two years spent in Europe entered upon his work. From 1857 to 1862 Lowell was the editor of the newly founded "Atlantic Monthly," and from 1863 to 1872 he was associated with Professor Charles Eliot Norton in editing the "North American Review." In 1864 he published a prose work, Fireside Travels," containing Cambridge Thirty Years Ago," and numerous other sketches written in his best vein. In 1866 appeared the second series of the "Biglow Papers," dealing with questions connected with the Civil War. Various volumes of essays in the same vein as "Fireside Travels" soon followed, including " Among my Books in 1870, "My Study Window in 1871, and "Among my Books," a second series, in 1876. The fact that Lowell was called upon to write the "Commemoration Ode" in honor of the sons of Harvard slain in the Civil War, two odes celebrating the centennial commemoration of battles in the Revolutionary War, and another ode in honor of the centennial anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, shows us the great regard he enjoyed as a popular poet. In 1877 Mr. Lowell was sent as Minister to Spain, and in 1880 was transferred to the Court of St. James, where he remained till 1885, becoming a prominent figure in the public and literary life of England, and one of the most popular and respected ambassadors ever sent there from any country in recent times. He was often called upon to deliver public addresses, many of which were collected and published in 1886 under the title of "Democracy, and Other Addresses," a volume in which he displays the mature judgment of the scholar, the man of letters, and the man of affairs. In 1888 he brought out a volume of "Political Essays," and his "Latest Literary Essays and Addresses" was issued in 1891, the year of his death. Lowell, though not the most popular of American poets, takes the foremost rank in American literature, as a satirist, essayist, and critic. Moreover, he was a most charming representative of the American gentleman and scholar, and all that is best in American life. His poetical writings are of uneven and disputed merit, but in his prose he is always clear and vigorous; scholarly but never pedantic; always inspiring and frequently brilliant. CAMBRIDGE THIRTY YEARS AGO A Memoir addressed to the Edelmann Storg in Rome IN N those quiet old winter evenings, around our Roman fireside, it was not seldom, my dear Storg, that we talked of the advantages of travel, and in speeches not so long that our cigars would forget their fire (the measure of just conversation) debated the comparative advantages of the Old and the New Worlds. You will remember how serenely I bore the imputation of provincialism, while I asserted that those advantages were reciprocal; that an orbed and balanced life would revolve between the old and the new as its opposite, but not antagonistic poles, the true equator lying somewhere midway between them. I asserted also that there were two epochs at which a man might travel-before twenty, for pure enjoyment, and after thirty, for instruction. At twenty, the eye is sufficiently delighted with merely seeing; new things are pleasant only because they are not old; and we take everything heartily and naturally in the right way, events being always like knives, which either serve us or cut us, as we grasp them by the blade or the handle. After thirty, we carry with us our scales with lawful weights stamped by experience, and our chemical tests acquired by study, with which to ponder and assay all arts, and institutions, and manners, and to ascertain either their absolute worth, or their merely relative value to ourselves. On the whole, I declared myself in favor of the after-thirty method-was it partly (so difficult is it to distinguish between opinions and personalities) because I had tried it myself, though with scales so imperfect and tests so inadequate? Perhaps so, but more because I held that a man should have travelled thoroughly round himself and the great terra incognita just outside and inside his own threshold, before he 1 This essay is taken from "Putnam's Magazine,” vol. iii., 1854. undertook voyages of discovery to other worlds. Let him first thoroughly explore that strange country laid down on the maps as Seauton; let him look down into its craters and find whether they be burnt out or only sleeping; let him know between the good and evil fruits of its passionate tropics; let him experience how healthful are its serene and high-lying table-lands; let him be many times driven back (till he wisely consent to be baffled) from its metaphysical Northwest passages that lead only to the dreary solitudes of a sunless world, before he think himself morally equipped for travels to more distant regions. But does he commonly even so much as think of this, or, while buying amplest trunks for his corporeal apparel, does it once occur to him how very small a portmanteau will contain all his mental and spiritual outfit? Oftener, it is true, that a man who could scarce be induced to expose his unclothed body, even in a village of prairie-dogs, will complacently display a mind as naked as the day it was born, without so much as a fig-leaf of acquirement on it, in every gallery of Europe. If not with a robe dyed in the Tyrian purple of imaginative culture, if not with the close-fitting active dress of social or business training -at least, my dear Storg, one might provide himself with the merest waist-clout of modesty! But if it be too much to expect men to traverse and survey themselves before they go abroad, we might certainly ask that they should be familiar with their own villages. If not even that, then it is of little import whither they go, and let us hope that, by seeing how calmly their own narrow neighborhood bears their departure, they may be led to think that the circles of disturbance set in motion by the fall of their tiny drop into the ocean of eternity, will not have a radius of more than a week in any direction; and that the world can endure the subtraction of even a justice of the peace with provoking equanimity. In this way, at least, foreign travel may do them good, may make them, if not wiser, at any rate less fussy. Is it a great way to go to school, and a great fee to pay for the lesson? We cannot pay too much for that genial stoicism which, when life flouts us and says-Put that in your pipe and smoke it!-can puff away with as sincere a relish as if it were tobacco of Mount Lebanon in a narghileh of Damascus. After all, my dear Storg, it is to know things that one has |