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In every land wherever might holds sway
The Pilgrims' leaven is at work to-day.
The Mayflower's cabin was the chosen womb
Of light predestined for the nations' gloom.
God grant that those who tend the sacred flame
May worthy prove of their Forefathers' name.
More light has come, - more dangers, too, perplex: 220
New prides, new greeds, our high condition vex.
The Fathers fled from feudal lords, and made
A freehold state; may we not retrograde
To lucre-lords and hierarchs of trade.

May we, as they did, teach in court and school,
There must be classes, but no class shall rule:
The sea is sweet, and rots not like the pool.
Though vast the token of our future glory,

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Though tongue of man hath told not such a story, — Surpassing Plato's dream, More's phantasy, - still

we

Have no new principles to keep us free.

As Nature works with changeless grain on grain,
The truths the Fathers taught we need again.
Depart from this, though we may crowd our shelves,
With codes and precepts for each lapse and flaw,
And patch our moral leaks with statute law,
We cannot be protected from ourselves!
Still must we keep in every stroke and vote
The law of conscience that the Pilgrims wrote;
Our seal their secret: LIBERTY CAN BE;

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235

240

THE STATE IS FREEDOM IF THE TOWN IS FREE.
The death of nations in their work began;
They sowed the seed of federated Man.

Dead nations were but robber-holds; and we
The first battalion of Humanity!

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All living nations, while our eagles shine,

One after one, shall swing into our line;
Our freeborn heritage shall be the guide
And bloodless order of their regicide;

The sea shall join, not limit; mountains stand
Dividing farm from farm, not land from land.

O people's Voice! when farthest thrones shall hear
When teachers own; when thoughtful rabbis know;
When artist minds in world-wide symbol show;
When serfs and soldiers their mute faces raise;
When priests on grand cathedral altars praise;
When pride and arrogance shall disappear,
The Pilgrims' Vision is accomplished here!

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JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL.

BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH.

JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL was born February 22, 1819, at Elmwood, Cambridge, Massachusetts, in the house where he died August 12, 1891. His early life was spent in Cambridge, and he has sketched many of the scenes in it very delightfully in Cambridge Thirty Years Ago, in his volume of Fireside Travels, as well as in his early poem, An Indian Summer Reverie. His father was a Congregationalist minister of Boston, and the family to which he belonged has had a strong representation in Massachusetts. His grandfather, John Lowell, was an eminent jurist, the Lowell Institute of Boston owes its endowment to John Lowell, a cousin of the poet, and the city of Lowell was named after Francis Cabot Lowell, an uncle, who was one of the first to begin the manufacturing of cotton in New England.

Lowell was a student at Harvard, and was graduated in 1838, when he gave a class poem, and in 1841 his first volume of poems, A Year's Life, was published. His bent from the beginning was more decidedly literary than that of any contemporary American poet. That is to say, the history and art of literature divided his interest with the production of literature, and he carries the unusual gift of rare critical power, joined to hearty, spontaneous creation. It may indeed be guessed that the keenness of judgment and incisiveness of wit which characterize his examination of literature have sometimes interfered with his poetic power,

and made him liable to question his art when he would rather have expressed it unchecked. In connection with Robert Carter, a littérateur who has lately died, he began, in 1843, the publication of The Pioneer, a Literary and Critical Magazine, which lived a brilliant life of three months. A volume of poetry followed in 1844, and the next year he published Conversations on Some of the Old Poets, a book which is now out of print, but interesting as marking the enthusiasm of a young scholar, treading a way then almost wholly neglected in America, and intimating a line of thought and study in which he afterward made most noteworthy ventures. Another series of poems followed in 1848, and in the same year The Vision of Sir Launfal. Perhaps it was in reaction from the marked sentiment of his poetry that he issued now a jeu d'esprit, A Fable for Critics, in which he hit off, with a rough and ready wit, the characteristics of the writers of the day, not forgetting himself in these lines:

"There is Lowell, who 's striving Parnassus to climb

With a whole bale of isms tied together with rhyme ;
He might get on alone, spite of brambles and boulders,
But he can't with that bundle he has on his shoulders;
The top of the hill he will ne'er come nigh reaching
Till he learns the distinction 'twixt singing and preaching;
His lyre has some chords that would ring pretty well,
But he'd rather by half make a drum of the shell,

And rattle away till he 's old as Methusalem,

At the head of a march to the last new Jerusalem."

This, of course, is but a half serious portrait of himself, and it touches but a single feature; others can say better that Lowell's ardent nature showed itself in the series of satirical poems which made him famous, The Biglow Papers, written in a spirit of indignation and fine scorn, when the Mexican War was causing many Americans to blush with shame at the use of the country by a class for its own ignoble ends. The true patriotism which marked these and