carry out his convictions in acts. In the
warfare he waged on slavery when the anti-slavery cause was very
unpopular, and, in the case of Garrison and others, brought on its
advocates continual danger and occasional violence, Lowell was
unsparing in the denunciation of the national sin; but whether because
the anti-abolition public which ruled Boston thought denunciation
in form of verse had no practical value, or because the personal
fascination the man always exercised on all around him was such as to
disarm hostility, it happened that he was never made the object of
aggression.

"Men called him but a shiftless youth,
In whom no good they saw;
And yet, unwittingly, in truth,
They made his careless word their law.

"Men granted that his speech was wise,
But, when a glance they caught
Of his slim grace and woman's eyes,
They laughed and called him good-for-naught."

There was a gracious indolence in him, an imperturbable serenity,
which made proclamation in advance of a truce to all forms of brute
collision. No doubt if they had hunted him out for a victim of the
political animosity which led to so many tragedies in the early days
of our anti-slavery agitation, he would have stood up to the stake as
gayly as one of the martyrs of old; but the man's nature was repugnant
to discords, and shrank from combats ruder than those of the
printing-press.

All through his career, the religion of humanity is put forward with
point and persistence, and the finest of distinctions in morality are
maintained,--the so constantly ignored vital difference between the
deed and its motive, as in "Sir Launfal:"--

"The Holy Supper is kept, indeed,
In whatso we share with another's need;
Not what we give, but what we share,--
For the gift without the giver is bare;
Who gives himself with his alms feeds three,--
Himself, his hungering neighbor, and Me;"

so that one might have expected from him the life of a social
reformer, so keenly did he feel the outrages of civilization. But,
possibly from the fact that in those days human slavery in our country
summed up all villainies and crimes, and in the war against that he
threw all his surplus energy, he never took part in the crusade then
beginning against the more familiar iniquities nearer home. But in his
constitution there was, I think, another reason why the author of "Sir
Launfal," "Hunger and Cold," "The Landlord," and "The Search" should
no