The pain, by the way, which he tried to assuage by writing, was some facial trouble which resulted in a swelling making him look, as he said, “like a hornpout with the mumps.” He had an odd experience with ether which he thus describes: “The ether didn’t deaden the pain a bit, that I could discover. Its only effect was to make my head feel as if it were violently waggled to and fro. One odd result there was. For a moment, I lost entirely my present personal identity, and absolutely _was_ (without anything of that sense of dualism which commonly goes along with and criticises hallucination) twelve years old and getting ready to go out shooting as I used. Odd as it seems, it was a most painful sensation, and all the rest of the night I was haunted by a feeling that my life was the merest illusion, and I a poor puppet worked by some humorous higher power, who could by a jerk put me back at Mr. Wells’s school if he liked.” In the midst of all this congenial labor he was moved also to write one more political article, which appeared in the _North American_ for October, 1866. The President and the Secretary of State had formed that curious combination which may be said still somewhat to baffle students of our political history, and Lowell wrote of it,--the last of his series of political writings growing out of the great conflict and the early movements toward reconstruction. Under the title, “The Seward-Johnson Reaction,” he examines all the elements in the situation, the President, the Secretary, Congress, and the two parties, and, as before, his study is less an analysis of the component parts than a reassertion of those fundamental principles which it was his political philosophy to seek for and expound. Trust in the people was the prime article of his creed; hence he sought chiefly for evidence of the settled drift of the nation’s conviction, conscience, and instinct. The great stake played for in the war was, in his words, the “Americanization of all America, nothing more and nothing less.” Yet with all his clear sight of the ideal and his confidence in the ultimate reason of national thought, Lowell was not a vague theorist nor a contemner of political activity. On the contrary, one of the most impassioned sentences in the paper is that in which he speaks of the dignity of politics. “Now that the signs of the times,” he says, “show unmistakably to what the popular mind is making itself up, they [members of Congress] have once more a policy, if we may call that so which is only a calculation of what it would be ‘safe to go before the people with,’ as they call it. It is always safe to go before them with plain principles of right, and with the conclusions that must be drawn from them by common sense, though this is what too many of our public men can never understand. Now joining a Know-Nothing ‘lodge,’ now hanging on the outskirts of a Fenian ‘circle,’ they mistake the momentary eddies of