Three days later, 10 May, 1884, he delivered, as president of the Wordsworth Society, the address on that poet which is included in his “Literary and Political Addresses.” He deprecated the notion that he could add materially to what he had written of Wordsworth in his more deliberate earlier paper,[89] for as he says: “Without unbroken time there can be no consecutive thought, and it is my misfortune that in the midst of a reflection or of a sentence I am liable to be called away by the bell of private or public duty.” The speech contains one or two critical passages which may be added to the sum of Lowell’s comment on Wordsworth; but to the student of Lowell’s mind as affected by new conditions and registering itself in new terms, the speech is more interesting because of the main thought in it, that which occupies him upon passing in review the work of Dr. Knight who had by his new edition of the poet enabled the student to perceive more clearly the development of Wordsworth’s thought. Precisely that examination which we are desirous of making of Lowell, Lowell set out to make of Wordsworth; but the eye of the student reveals something of the mind that prompts the eye’s excursion, and Lowell was in a way suggesting the movement of his own thought when, upon enquiring what was the solution by which Wordsworth attempted as he grew in years to justify his own early radicalism with his later conservatism, he found a very powerful influence in that religious conception which dominated Wordsworth’s later thought. “I see no reason to think,” he says, “that he ever swerved from his early faith in the beneficence of freedom, but rather that he learned the necessity of defining more exactly in what freedom consisted, and the conditions, whether of time or place, under which alone it can be beneficent, of insisting that it must be an evolution and not a manufacture, and that it should coördinate itself with the prior claims of society and civilization.” But the roots of freedom were planted in the individual nature, and there they were to be nourished. Development of character--yes, but by what means? “Observation convinced him that what are called the safeguards of society are the staff also of the individual members of it; that tradition, habitude, and heredity are great forces, whether for impulse or restraint. He had pondered a pregnant phrase of the poet Daniel, where he calls religion ‘mother of Form and Fear.’ A growing conviction of its profound truth turned his mind towards the church as the embodiment of the most potent of all traditions, and to her public offices as the expression of the most socially humanizing of all habitudes.”