The after-dinner speech for which Lowell consented to postpone his summer journey to England was in response to the toast “Our Literature.” The speech appears as the last piece of literature which Lowell published in his collected writings, and it is a coincidence that this should stand at the end of his career, when at the beginning, if we may, not unnaturally, count _The Pioneer_ as his formal bow in the profession of letters, stood the announcement of his outlook on national literature. Nearly forty-seven years lie between the two deliverances. As a young man of twenty-three he scouted the idea of an artificial division between the literature of America and that of England, he deprecated the too close dependence upon the current judgments of English writers for the press, and he pleaded eagerly for a natural literature in America, the free reflection of a free people. Now, with the reflection of age he considers in his brief space those fundamental principles which make for the endurance of a national literature,--the right sense of proportion between things material and things spiritual, the necessity of inviolable standards, the dependence upon the whole literature of the world. His last word is a word of hope, as was befitting a prophet of literature, standing at the end of the first century of a nation’s life, as years are measured from the consciousness of existence. “The literature of a people should be the record of its joys and sorrows, its aspirations and its shortcomings, its wisdom and its folly, the confidant of its soul. We cannot say that our own as yet suffices us, but I believe that he who stands a hundred years hence where I am standing now, conscious that he speaks to the most powerful and prosperous community ever devised or developed by man, will speak of our literature with the assurance of one who beholds what we hope for and aspire after become a reality and a possession forever.” * * * * * Lowell sailed for England 18 May, 1889, and spent five months there at his customary haunts in London and in Whitby, revisiting his old friends and preferring the intimate associations to the social functions. “You ask me so many things,” he writes to Mrs. Clifford from Radnor Place, 17 June, “in such a breathless way--all of them disparate, and some of them desperate--that I know not which way to turn. Besides, haven’t you confessed that you set springes in your notes? And how can I tell but that every? is a springe (they look like it), and that I may not find myself dangling like an unwary hare with no chance ever to put my foot into anything again? However, I will tread cautiously and give each of ’em a little preliminary shake to see if there be any mischief in ’em.