so his literary life began definitely to share in public affairs and to take on the _quasi_-civic character which was to become more and more his distinction, until it should reach its development, on the side of his genius, in the patriotic odes, and its acknowledgment, on the part of the people, in his offices of national trust. Seldom, indeed, has the peculiar privacy of a poet’s life passed by so even and natural a growth into the publicity and dignity of the great citizen’s. But, in the narrow space of this sketch, one must not crowd the lines; and in the way of biography, of which little can be novel to the reader, it is enough to recall to mind the general course of Lowell’s life; how he founded _The Atlantic_, which was to prove a diary of the contemporary literary age; and in the Lowell Institute first displayed on a true scale the solidity and acuteness of his critical scholarship, and gave material aid to the national cause and the war on slavery, as he had always done, by his brilliant satire, his ambushing humor and more marvelous pathos; and became the Harvard professor, succeeding Longfellow; and after a residence in Leipsic settled again at Elmwood to give fresh books to the world, and to be, perhaps, the most memorable figure in the minds of several generations of Harvard students. Nor can one leave unmentioned the more familiar features of the social life in these years of his second marriage--a life somewhat retired and quiet but filled full of amiability, wit and intellectual delight, led partly in Longfellow’s study, or in the famous Saturday Club, or in the weekly whist meetings, and partly in Elmwood itself. That past lives in tradition and anecdotage, and in it Lowell appears as the life and spirit of the wine, with a conversational play so rich in substance and in allusion that, it is said, one must have heard and seen with his own eyes and ears, before he can realize that what seems the studied abundance and changeableness of his essays is in fact the spontaneity of nature, the mother-tongue of the man.