“And I mean to live as one beloved by such a woman should live. She is every way noble. People have called ‘Irene’ a beautiful piece of poetry. And so it is. It owes all its beauty to her, and were it a thousand times as beautiful would not be so much so as she is to me.” The strong emotional experience which thus possessed Lowell came to him when he was largely under the sway of sentiment, but though, as we have seen, it was translated into poetry very freely, it is not so much the immediate expression in literary form which concerns us as it is the infusion of an element in the formation of character. Lowell was overcharged in his youth with sensitiveness in affection. There was a fitfulness in his demonstration of it, an almost ungovernable outflow of feeling, which left him in danger of coming under the control of morbid impulse. What he required, and what most happily he found, was the serenity and steadfastness of a nature, exalted like his own, but glowing with an ardor which had other than purely personal aim. Miss White was a highly sensitive girl of a type not unknown, especially at that time, in New England. Of delicate sensibility, she listened eagerly to the voices rising about her which found their choragus in Emerson. It was before the time of much organization among women, but not before the time when one and another woman, inheritors of a refined conscience, stirred by the movement in the air, sought to do justice to their convictions in espousing this or that moral cause, not at all necessarily in public championship, but in the eloquent zeal of domestic life. As her brother William was to become an active reformer, so she fed her spirit with aspirations for temperance, and for that abolition of slavery which was already beginning to dominate the moral earnestness of the community, holding all other reforms as subordinate to this. Lowell, seeing in her a Una, was quickened in the spirit which had already been awakened, and instantly donned his armor as her Red Cross Knight.[26] At this period there was a much greater homogeneity in New England life, than there has been at any time since. The democratizing of society had been going on under favoring conditions, for industry was still at the basis of order, less was made of the distinction of wealth, more of the distinction of education, the aristocratic element was under the same general law of hard work, and a proletariat class had not been created by an inflow of the waste of Europe which inevitably accompanied the sturdy peasants. The city had not yet swept ardent youth into its rapids, and the simplicity of modes of life was hardly more marked in the country than in the town. Whoever recalls the now old-fashioned tales by Miss Catherine Sedgwick will have a truthful picture of a social order which seems Arcadian in the haze of sixty years since.