In sending “Endymion” to his publishers for insertion in the volume “Heartsease and Rue,” Lowell had written from Deerfoot Farm, 20 December, 1887: “I hoped to have sent this [‘Endymion’] by Monday morning’s post, but for two days after my return my head continued to be cloggy and my vein wouldn’t flow. I have at last managed to give what seems to me as much consecutiveness as they need to what have been a heap of fragments in my note-books for years. Longer revolution in my head might round it better, but take it as a meteorolite, splintery still, but with some metallic iridescence here and there brought from some volcanic star. Let it come among poems of sentiment, and as the longest, first if possible.” He was still looking forward at this time to full labors. He had been urged by his publishers to undertake the volume on Hawthorne in the _American Men of Letters_ series. He had signified his assent in general, some time before, and seemed now to be deliberately contemplating the task, for he wrote four days after the last:-- “I think there have been one or two volumes published within a few years about _old_ Salem. I should be glad to have them sent to me at Southborough. I have one little job of writing to finish, after which I shall revise my poems and prose for a new edition. I don’t know whether it be second childhood, but I am beginning to take an interest in them. Then I mean to take up Hawthorne in earnest....” Before “Heartsease and Rue” was published Lowell had begun the task of setting in order all his writings. With some hesitation he published in the spring of 1888 a volume of “Political Essays,” in which he gathered the articles printed in the _Atlantic_ and _North American Review_ during the stormy war period, but he added as the final number his address on “The Independent in Politics,” given in New York, 13 April, 1888. It may be noted that, with no apparent definiteness of purpose, Lowell did in the closing years of his life sum up, in forms which occasions for the most part suggested, his leading principles and doctrines, as if in a series of valedictories. Thus “Democracy” was a confession of his fundamental belief in the region of world-politics; his address at Harvard was the one word on scholarship which at the end of a scholar’s life he most wished to say; his address before the Copyright League had touched on points in the great theme of literature which had been of lifelong interest; in his serious poetry, as we have seen, he touched upon those great themes of both worlds which, as a seer of visions all his life, he could not fail to find deepening in his thought; and now he took the opportunity furnished by a friendly audience to set forth some of those principles which had formed his rule of conduct throughout a life that had found active employment in citizenship. There is no lack of definiteness in this address, and yet the period just before its delivery, when he may be supposed to have