These corkscrew shafts are so narrow and the steps so steep that there is no room for a hand rail. Only a dangling rope gives hope that you will some time reach your goal through the impending gloom. The low-roofed rooms above are habitations of the poor and of the Italians, but they have about as much comfort as the best citizens had in the earlier days of the republic. Senators and ruling elders in those days had to climb hand over hand up perilous stairs to dark, unhealthy chambers. Now, not only the rich, but the average citizens live in broad streets and well ventilated houses, and the poor are not confined to the narrow quarters I have described. The expanding map of Geneva speaks also of the expanding life of that republic which from the four walls of its mediæval ramparts and its mediæval thinking has grown to be a city of beauty and comfort and a center of intellectual delight.

As I trundle home in the car I do not enjoy steam tramways which run but once an hour, but if I lived in one of several other suburbs I might get there by electricity at short intervals. On wet days I do not altogether approve of macadamized streets in cities, but I reflect that they are much better than cobble stones. When going about to make purchases I do not find all the shop-keepers out looking at Mt. Blanc and the beauties of the lake. They are attending to business with the ordinary eye for the main chance, but it would not be well to speak disrespectfully of the scenery, for somehow it has taken hold of their pride and their affections. When I sit down and talk with people I find their ideas on political and social questions in many ways less artificial than usual on the continent; in fact their views of men and manners are so like my own that I seem to be among my own people; my own indeed, educated in democratic ideas, but somehow speaking French.

Lowell as a Citizen.

By EDWIN MIMS, PH. D.

I think it is generally agreed that Lowell was the most representative man of letters that America has produced. use the term "man of letters" in contradistinction to the creative artist; as a creative writer he was easily surpassed by Hawthorne and Poe, and he has not the place in the intellectual and spiritual life of this country that Emerson has. Other Americans have surpassed him as poets, scholars, editors, teachers, and reformers, though not perhaps as critics. But because he combined so many gifts, because he was so versatile in his talents and so national in spirit, he has his place as no other of our authors in Mr. Woodrow Wilson's "Calendar of Great Americans." Especially after he became Ambassador to England, or as the Spectator felicitously expressed it, "Ambassador from American literature to the Court of Shakspere," he seemed to many of his fellow-citizens the one man of letters who summed up in himself their best qualities—one such as he himself described in the address delivered at the 250th anniversary of the founding of Harvard College: "A man of culture, a man of intellectual resources, a man of public spirit, a man of refinement, with that good taste which is the conscience of the mind, and that conscience which is the good taste of the soul."

It is of Lowell as a citizen of the Republic that I would write-of his public spirit, his active interest in all the stirring events of his age. To him the recluse's life was very attractive; the titles of two of his most significant books, "Among My Books" and "My Study Windows," are suggestive of the delight he always took in a life of studious leisure and in the delightful companionship of his books. But he was no less interested in the affairs of his countrymen, in their "joys and sorrows, aspirations and short-comings." It was his belief that in a democracy every man must do what he can to create the right public sentiment. "The true danger to popular forms of government," he says, "begins when public opinion ceases, because the people are incompetent or unwilling to think. In

a democracy it is the duty of every citizen to think; but unless the thinking result in a definite opinion, and the opinion lead to considerate action, they are nothing." And again, "In a society like ours, where every man may transmute his private thought into history and destiny by dropping it into the ballot-box, a peculiar responsibility rests upon the individual. Nothing can absolve us from doing our best to look at all public questions as citizens, and therefore in some sort as administrators and rulers." With this high ideal of citizenship, he tried now through his poetry and now through his essays and addresses to call the attention of his countrymen to the most vital problems as he saw them.

One might think of Poe's poems as written in France, so little is there of local flavor; and it would not be difficult to think of Emerson as a fellow-countryman of Carlyle; but Lowell's works could have been written only by one who lived in the United States from 1845 to 1891. In his humor, good sense and instinctive faith in a democracy, he was thoroughly American; and in the Anti-slavery cause and later in the struggle for the Union and still later in the reform movement in politics, he found his most distinctive work.

His keen sense of the obligations of citizenship was a growth. One would fail to detect the author of the "Biglow Papers" and "Abraham Lincoln" in the "quips and cranks" of his early writings for "Harvardiana" or the reckless verse of the class-poem, in which he satirizes the abolitionists and transcendentalists. At Harvard College he had little interest in politics. In his "James Russell Lowell and His Friends," Dr. Edward Everett Hale has given a vivid picture of the life of the undergraduates at Harvard when he and Lowell were students there in the thirties. Literature was their passiona new volume of Tennyson, brought over from England by Emerson, a new work of Carlyle, some new bit of French literature absorbed their interest.

There was only one abolitionist in college in 1838. Lowell read widely in English and continental literature, but cared very little for his college work. His disposition "to sacrifice two or three recitations' for a sea-beach in the afternoon, or perhaps for an evening party twenty miles away," led finally

to his "rustication” at Concord for several weeks before commencement. All goes to show that at this period of his life, the humor that was always so characteristic of him, had full sway and was unbalanced by any "high seriousness." When he published his volume of poems in 1841, he gave no evidence of any other passion than love; he was the disciple of Keats and Tennyson (the Tennyson of 1830 and 1832) and a reader of the Elizabethan dramatists. A friend of his in criticising one of his early poems, wrote him:

"It is too warm, rich, and full of sweet sounds and sights; the incense overpowers me, and the love and crime, and prayers and marks and glimpses of spirits oppress me. I am too much of a clod of earth to mingle well in such elements. I feel while reading it as though I were lying upon a bed of down with a canopy of rose-colored silk above me, with gleams of sunshine darting in the room. It is the proper reading for pure-minded loving creatures, from whose eyes knowledge with its hard besom has not yet swept away the golden cobwebs of fancy."

Carlyle was making the same criticism of Tennyson's early poems (Airy, Fairy, Lillian, etc.,) when he called them "lollipops," and Lowell himself afterwards spoke of his early poems as "poor windfalls of unripe experience." Gradually, however, the intimate companionship of Maria White, who "had in her something of the spirit of a prophetess," and the atmosphere that he was breathing in New England, brought about a change in his character and his work. In the 1843 volume of poems we note a change "in the direction of poetic earnestness," moral enthusiasm becomes allied with the artistic impulse. The "great voices" that were sounding from across the Atlantic, and the general stir of new thought that was making for the Renaissance in New England, inspired him with a new sense of the mission of poetry. As Mr. Scudder says, "At this time, certainly, Lowell's conception of the function of the poet has blended with his apprehension of the divine order, and he entered upon the discharge of poetic duties with the seriousness which a young priest might have carried to the sacred office." In impassioned prose Lowell gives expression to his view of the poet's place in the life of the world.

"Poets are the forerunners and prophets of changes in the moral world. Driven, by their finer nature, to search into

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and reverently contemplate the universal laws of soul, they find some fragments of the broken tables of God's law, and interpret it, half conscious of its mighty import. poet utters truths to be sneered at, perchance, by contemporaries, but which become religion to posterity. . dreams of poets are morning-dreams, coming to them in the early dawn and day-breaking of great truths, and are surely fulfilled at last."

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At first this spirit of reform was more general than particular-a spirit of freedom that any young poet might have on first coming to himself-but gradually as slavery began to loom up as the one serious problem of the nation, he became actively identified with the anti-slavery cause. "He found himself confronting a monstrous denial of this truth of freedom issuing in human brotherhood when he contemplated slavery in America." Under the conviction of the injustice and inhumanity of slavery, he wrote his stirring poems, "The Present Crisis," "Stanzas on Freedom," "The Capture of Fugitive Slaves," passages from which became the rallying cry of the hosts of freedom. In all of these poems one finds "the love of God, of Freedom, and of Man;" a realization of "the glorious claims of human brotherhood." Like Longfellow and Whittier, he voiced the spirit of reform.

When Lowell took up the question of slavery, it was no longer a question of the abolition of slavery in the states, although he may have favored that in his earlier days, but a question of the extension of slavery into new territory. The problem did not now assume the proportions that it did at the time of the Kansas-Nebraska Bill and the Dred Scott decision, but it was apparent to thoughtful men that with the Mexican War would come the annexation of slave territory; "not what should be done to reverse the past, but what should be done to redeem the future," was the problem. The problem was all the more serious from the fact that the Southern leaders were becoming more and more aggressive, "pleading for the existence of slavery, then for its equality, and at last claiming for it an absolute dominion.”

Mr. Rhodes, in his history of the United States from 18501864, has traced the growth of the slavery sentiment in the