I confess to thinking more of James Russell Lowell as a critic and master of prose than as a poet. His single-hearted enthusiasm for Letters had a glowing quality which made it a guiding star for the frail barque of culture. His humour, breadth of view, sagacity, and the all-round character of his activities has hardly been equalled in your country. Not so great a thinker or poet as Emerson, not so creative as Hawthorne, so original in philosophy and life as Thoreau, so racy and quaint as Holmes, he ran the gamut of those qualities as none of the others did; and as critic and analyst of literature surpassed them all. But I cannot hope to add anything of value to American estimate and praise of Lowell――critic, humorist, poet, editor, reformer, man of Letters, man of State affairs. I may, perhaps, be permitted however to remind you of two sayings of his: “I am never lifted up to any peak of vision――but that when I look down in hope to see some valley of the Beautiful Mountains I behold nothing but blackened ruins, and the moans of the down-trodden the world over.... Then it seems as if my heart would break in pouring out one glorious song that should be the Gospel of Reform, full of consolation and strength to the oppressed――that way my madness lies.” That was one side of the youthful Lowell, the generous righter of wrongs, the man. And this other saying: “The English-speaking nations should build a monument to the misguided enthusiasts of the plains of Shinar, for as the mixture of many bloods seems to have made them the most vigorous of modern races, so has the mingling of divers speeches given them a language which is perhaps the noblest vehicle of poetic thought that ever existed.” That was the other side of Lowell, the enthusiast for Letters; and that the feeling he had about our language. I am wondering, indeed, Mr. President, what those men who in the fourteenth, fifteenth, sixteenth centuries were welding the English language would think if they could visit this hall to-night, if suddenly we saw them sitting here among us in their monkish dress, their homespun, or their bright armour, having come from a greater Land even than America――the Land of the Far Shades. What expression should we see on the dim faces of them, the while they took in the marvellous fact that the instrument of speech they forged in the cottages, courts, cloisters, and castles of their little misty island had become the living speech of half the world, and the second tongue for all the nations of the other half! For even so it is now――this English language, which they made, and Shakespeare crowned, which you speak and we speak, and men speak under the Southern Cross, and unto the Arctic Seas!