r from the accumulations
of vast mercantile wealth when under the benign constraints of religion.
Wealth is the handmaid of religion. Such wealth has beautified the face
of society, has advanced to this consummation those great philanthropic
enterprises which have delivered the oppressed and saved the Republic,
and which have filled our city with schools of learning, galleries of
art, halls of justice, houses of mercy, and temples of piety. [Continued
applause.]

CHARLES ELIOT NORTON

CASTLES IN SPAIN

[Speech of Charles Eliot Norton at the "Whittier Dinner," in celebration
of the poet's seventieth birthday, and the twentieth birthday of the
"Atlantic Monthly," given by the publishers of the magazine, Boston,
December 17, 1877. William Dean Howells, then editor of the
"Atlantic," officiated as chairman. Mr. Norton spoke for James Russell
Lowell, the first editor of the "Atlantic," then serving as United
States Minister to Spain.]

MR. CHAIRMAN AND GENTLEMEN:--We miss to-night one man to whom
many names are equally befitting: the humorist, the wit, the wise
thinker, the poet, the scholar, the worker, the friend--but the man who,
of all others, should be here to do honor to our guest. We miss the
first editor of the "Atlantic," whose comprehensive sympathies, wide as
his vast, broad genius; whose cultivated taste, whose various and
thorough learning gave to our Monthly, from the beginning, first place
among American magazines and secured for it that deserved popularity
which you, sir [Mr. Howells], are doing so much to maintain. The same
qualities which made him eminent as an editor will make him eminent as
the representative abroad of what is best in the social and political
life of our country. No man could more truly exhibit, as comprehending
them in himself, the high spirit, the noble aims, the varied
achievements of a generous and large-minded nation--a nation not always
so careful as it ought to be that its ministers accredited to foreign
powers should be servants creditable to itself. But in the place that he
now fills I cannot but regard him as, in a special sense, the envoy of
the company gathered around this table. I believe that every one of us
has, or at least has had, possessions in Spain that require to be well
looked after; they are possessions of extraordinary, enormous, quite
incalculable value, of which the title deeds are not always as complete
as we could wish. Lowell himself