This is not what one looks for in a speech at a party caucus. Neither the independence of the speaker’s attitude nor his moderate adhesion to the party in which he enrolls himself are very effective instruments, and it is clear that despite Lowell’s sympathy with the plain man and his intimate acquaintance with him as illustrated in his “Biglow Papers,” he was embarrassed when he came to speak to him in the collectivity of a public meeting, and scarcely let his natural voice even be heard. Much must be referred, it is true, to his inexperience with speaking at public meetings--he was not a speaker in the old anti-slavery days, but his inexperience was due largely to his fastidiousness of temper which made him after all in literature rather than in life pleased with the vision of
“The backwoods Charlemagne of empires new.”
He found his own voice more surely in his study than on the rostrum, and it is to his Fourth of July Ode in this centennial year that we must look for the most comprehensive and most natural expression of his political sentiment. In poetry he found it easiest to reiterate that faith which he had in an elemental America, as it were, a faith which was derived from a belief in God, and that
“Life’s bases rest Beyond the probe of chemic test;”
but he refuses for all that to take refuge in a mere blind confidence, admitting a little ruefully that the flight of years had won him
“this unwelcome right To see things as they are, or shall be soon, In the frank prose of undissembling noon!”
The democratic principle, too, which he held so stoutly comes to him now as the manifestation of human life concretely apprehended rather than theoretically conceived, and the development of his own maturer judgment appears in this resolution to find the base of national life in the men who built the nation, and not in the mere speculation of freedom and democracy.
Lowell published the three odes called out by the centennial celebrations in a little volume entitled “Three Memorial Poems,” which he inscribed to Mr. Godkin “in cordial acknowledgment of his eminent service in heightening and purifying the tone of our political thought.” At the request of his publishers he was also assembling his poems for a new and so far complete collection in what was to be known as the Household Edition. Perhaps the title was in his mind when he wrote in the fall to a correspondent who had expressed his appreciation, “I would rather be a fireside friend and the Galeotto of household love than anything else. I was especially pleased that you had found out how much better the second series of the Biglow is than the first. I had not seen them for years when I had to read them through for a new edition this summer, and I found them entertaining.”