he elect company of public souls.

No doubt we have had in this country distinguished practitioners of
literature who have stood mainly or wholly outside the line of the Great
Tradition. They drew their inspiration elsewhere. Poe, for example, is not
of the company; Hawthorne in his lonelier moods is scarcely of the company.
In purely literary fame, these names may be held to outrank the name of
James Russell Lowell; as Emerson outranks him, of course, in range of
vision, Longfellow in craftsmanship, and Walt Whitman in sheer power of
emotion and of phrase. But it happens that Lowell stands with both Emerson
and Whitman in the very centre of that group of poets and prose-men who
have been inspired by the American idea. They were all, as we say proudly
nowadays, "in the service," and the particular rank they may have chanced
to win is a relatively insignificant question, except to critics and
historians.

The centenary of the birth of a writer who reached three score and ten is
usually ill-timed for a proper perspective of his work. A generation has
elapsed since his death. Fashions have changed; writers, like bits of old
furniture, have had time to "go out" and not time enough to come in again.
George Eliot and Ruskin, for instance, whose centenaries fall in this year,
suffer the dark reproach of having been "Victorians." The centenaries of
Hawthorne and Longfellow and Whittier were celebrated at a period of
comparative indifference to their significance. But if the present moment
is still too near to Lowell's life-time to afford a desirable literary
perspective, a moral touchstone of his worth is close at hand. In this hour
of heightened national consciousness, when we are all absorbed with the
part which the English-speaking races are playing in the service of the
world, we may surely ask whether Lowell's mind kept faith with his blood
and with his citizenship, or whether, like many a creator of exotic, hybrid
beauty, he remained an alien in the spiritual commonwealth, a homeless,
masterless man.

No one needs to speak in Cambridge of Lowell's devotion to the community in
which he was born and in which he had the good fortune to die. In some of
his most delightful pages he has recorded his affection for it. Yonder in
the alcoves of Harvard Hall, then the College Library, he discovered many
an author unrepresented among his father's books at Elmwood. In University
Hall he attended chapel--occasionally. In the open spa