aesthetic culture should not be hampered and impeded by New England prejudices. Whereas we ought to reverence the strength of thought of Jonathan Edwards we must as certainly admire the culture of John Ruskin and have no patience with the intolerance and narrowness of Cotton Mather.

In accordance with the principles of evolution it may be expected that the Puritan would leave behind him the weaknesses of his character, and now after several generations he is turning; he is beginning to unite beauty with worship, to broaden his education, to enlarge his conceptions and he is producing such men as Hawthorne and Emerson and Lowell.

Lemuel Aiken Welles.

SUGGESTIVENESS.

At the ending of the day,

When the last and richest ray

Of the sunset fades away

Into the night,

There softly come to me

Dreams, the fairest and the rarest,
Of that world-old mystery,—

The life beyond the sea.

'Mid the silence of the graves,

In the moaning of the waves,

When the wind so fiercely raves

Along the shore,

There blend in harmony

Sounds, the sweetest and the deepest,

Of a soul-warm melody

From far across the sea.

In the kisses of a child,

When the mem'ry is beguiled

By its love thoughts into mild
Forgetfulness,

There flit so stilly by

Forms, the truest and the purest,

Who know all the mystery

Beyond the silent sea.

C. S. Schumaker.

TWO SUMMER DAYS.

When the wind is from the West-then the breakers sink to sleep,
Only rows of swashing ripples up the yellow shingle creep,
With a whisper and a sighing,

When the summer day is dying,

And the breeze is full of fragrance from the meadow land and lea
As it sweeps with woodsy sweetness o'er the sparkle of the sea.
Sunny skies and shining sand

When the wind comes from the land.

Where the azure blue of ocean and the paler sky have kissed
The horizon line is clearly etched,-no blurring haze of mist.

Through the vastness gently heaving

Coasters plough, their bluff bows cleaving

With a wake of foamy tossing, and each weather-darkened sail

Gleaming cloudlike in the brilliance, stretched to straining by the gale. Shippers take a turn below

While the western breezes blow.

When the wind shifts to nor'east, and the sky is murky gray
While the ragged clouds are flying low like fateful birds of prey,
And the heavy surf is pounding

In the storm deep basso sounding,

Through streaming mist and flying scud dark blots of sail show dull, Where heaped up seas and shrieking wind drive on the straining hull. Bitter life before the mast

In a howling nor'east blast.

Ralph D. Paine.

THE

JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL.

HE death of James Russell Lowell may fairly be said to mark the close of the first period in American letters. Of all that distinguished company of men whose work and lives have established in America a national literature, only two yet remain and both of these have now passed into a season of literary inactivity to which long and productive lives richly entitle them and which is but the springtime of the eternal rest from their labors.

Perhaps the most striking characteristic of the Cambridge school is the intense interest it manifested in the great questions which from time to time have aroused the nation. Consequently its members were exposed to all the fury of a hostile majority in a people whose highest aims seemed political and financial aggrandisement, and to none of them was it directed more hotly than to the author of such bold satire as the Biglow Papers. But the generations that lived in the midst of the stirring political scenes of the century have now all but passed away, and a new one, incapable of comprehending the strength and bitterness of party feeling, has taken their place. The logic of events proved the truths which Lowell so tellingly uttered and prejudice has given way to a sound and unbiassed criticism.

Up to the time of the Mexican War, Lowell's claim to popular recognition was based solely on a few volumes of verse; and this, though marked by depth and purity of thought and tone, thorough sympathy with nature and uncommon lyric sweetness, had as yet failed to touch any absolutely new note.

But an occasion found the man awaiting it. Springs which had refused to flow at every chance sounding now gushed forth in obedience to the conjurer's wand. A great national sin stirred the poet and the fantastic Biglow Papers resulted. They soon convinced the world that a new and real genius had inspired them, yet the poet himself was slow to recognize the true value of his idea. The dry and caustic wit of Hosea Biglow suddenly became a power in the land and Lowell himself tells us,"I soon found that I held in my hand a weapon, instead the fencing-stick I had supposed." Though in homely phrase, they contain perhaps greater originality and terse, forceful truth than any of his more conventional work. Behind the light and frivolous expression which is their chief external characteristic, we can see the man himself; a man really and terribly in earnest.

The notes sounded here are the fundamental tones which underlie the more complex harmony of his whole

life. The first flood of manly enthusiasm in now past. The voice that spoke in the Biglow Papers only gains in depth and volume and richness as the years roll on. Hear his clear tones rising above the din of Anti-slavery agitation:

But at last the struggle was over and the re-united land, amid all the rejoicing, paused to do reverence to its hallowed dead. Among these were fourscore who had gone from Harvard to answer their country's call. In his noble ode in commemoration of their heroic death, Lowell seized and fitly used the supreme occasion of his life. And here again he tells us that, living or dying, fidelity to truth is the one thing all-desirable.

Though Lowell confines the direct expression of moral and political convictions to his poetry alone, yet we find in his prose, and especially in that of a critical nature, the same individuality, the same sure, independent note of truth which is in all things the very essence of the man. And with this as a foundation, and by the aid of rich scholarship and a free and varied style, he rears a structure which is as yet unsurpassed by anything in American literature.

Perhaps as a result of the affection with which Lowell was regarded abroad, a certain class of thick-and-thin

patriots have charged him with disloyalty to his own country. But they in the valley are unable to comprehend the view of him who surveys life from the mountain top. He is in the wider and truer sense a patriot, who perceives not only his country's glories, but her defects as well. Manliness and truth are before country.

"Before man made us citizens

Great nature made us men."

We find, then, in Lowell a poet of vigorous yet delicate touch, a critic of wonderful insight and breadth of view, and, taken all in all, our foremost man of letters. Nor is this all; aside from his purely literary eminence he stands for a higher culture, a more perfect citizenship and as "an ideal man of the world."

R. C. W. Wadsworth.

NOTABILIA.

A CRITICAL period has arrived in our athletics. The year is in many respects like the opening of '86 when the recent past was a gloomy list of uniform defeats along every line. And it must be seen in the same light, and met with the same spirit that animated Yale men of that day. The time for regret has ended; not an undergraduate who takes pride in his Alma Mater is entitled for a moment now to look complacently on our uncertain future. It is common to gloss defeat by remarking that an occasional loss sharpens the rivalry, increases the uncertainty and revives public interest. True, but such words are neither becoming nor loyal. Although there are exceptional years the material in college averages much the same. Yale in the past has been stimulus if not instructor to her rivals in more than one branch of athletics. Are we then to confess that we cannot keep pace with their