prepared it, was one of even unwonted depression. “It isn’t pleasant to think one’s self a failure at seventy,” he wrote 27 March, 1888, “and yet that’s the way it looks to me most of the time. I _can’t_ do my best. That’s the very torment of it. Why not reconcile one’s self with being second-rate? Isn’t it better than nothing? No, ’tis being nowhere.” And on being expostulated with, he wrote again: “It isn’t the praise I care for (though of course I should like it as well as Milton did, I suppose),--I mean the praise of others,--but what I miss is a comfortable feeling of merit in myself. I have never even opened my new book since it was published--I haven’t dared.” It would be idle to seek too narrowly for the causes of this despondency. As we have had frequent occasion to note, Lowell all his life was subject to fluctuation of moods. The most comprehensive cause was no doubt in the very constitution of his temperament, and as he was overclouded at times, so for him the sun when it shone was more brilliant than to many. But one asks most anxiously, are such moods superficial or do they trench upon the very citadel of being, sapping and mining the walls, so that if entrance is made, the very heart stops beating. In all the shifting of Lowell’s mind there were great fundamental beliefs from which he would not be separated. It may be that in those deepest laid foundations of being, where the bed-rock of faith in spiritual realities is discovered to be a ledge of the rock of ages, Lowell finally, as we have seen, confessed to an ultimate expression of faith, which was that of a child in the dark; but how was it as regards that firm belief in his country which had been a passion with him all his days, and was in truth an elemental faith with him? It is hard to read his last political discourse, “The Place of the Independent in Politics,” without a little sense of pain mingled with one’s admiration for the serenity of the temper with which Lowell made what was in effect a confession of his political faith; for when one comes to rest his hopes for his country in the remnant, he confesses almost to as much doubt as confidence. It must of course be remembered that Lowell had given expression to his large faith in democracy in his Birmingham address, and he calls the attention of his audience to this as an explanation of the terms in which he is to address his own countrymen. He might properly use a note of warning among a people whose cardinal doctrine was the democratic principle, and he was justified unquestionably in giving frankly his impressions of the low point to which political organizations had fallen. Still, in undertaking to account for the evolution of the democratic idea in American life, he was questioning whether after all opportunity had not much to do with it, and whether now that the walls were closing about this new country, the force of evolution had not been largely spent. The dangers imminent