rich in purely literary material; in the illustration
of the temper of historic periods; in the exhibition of changes in language
and in literary forms. The lover of sheer beauty in words, the analyzer of
literary types, the student of biography, find here ample material for
their special investigations. But the stress is laid, not so much upon the
quality of individual genius, as upon the political and moral instincts of
the English-speaking races, their long fight for liberty and democracy,
their endeavor to establish the terms upon which men may live together in
society. And precisely here, I take it, is the significance of the pages
which Professors Greenlaw and Hanford assign to James Russell Lowell. The
man whom we commemorate to-night played his part in the evolution which has
transformed the Elizabethan Englishman into the twentieth-century American.
Lowell was an inheritor and an enricher of the Great Tradition.

This does not mean that he did not know whether he was American or English.
He wrote in 1866 of certain Englishmen: "They seem to forget that more than
half the people of the North have roots, as I have, that run down more than
two hundred years deep into this new-world soil--that we have not a thought
nor a hope that is not American." In 1876, when his political independence
made him the target of criticism, he replied indignantly: "These fellows
have no notion what love of country means. It is in my very blood and
bones. If I am not an American, who ever was?"

It remains true, nevertheless, that Lowell's life and his best writing are
keyed to that instinct of personal discipline and civic responsibility
which characterized the seventeenth century emigrants from England. These
successors of Roger Ascham and Thomas Elyot and Philip Sidney were
Puritanic, moralistic, practical; and with their "faith in God, faith in
man and faith in work" they built an empire. Lowell's own mind, like
Franklin's, like Lincoln's, had a shrewd sense of what concerns the common
interests of all. The inscription beneath his bust on the exterior of
Massachusetts Hall runs as follows: "Patriot, scholar, orator, poet, public
servant." Those words begin and end upon that civic note which is heard in
all of Lowell's greater utterances. It has been the dominant note of much
of the American writing that has endured. And it is by virtue of this note,
touched so passionately, so nobly, throughout a long life, that Lowell
belongs to t