The daily morning journal and courier., 1898-12-14
MIR. JEFFERsoN'S REMARKS ON
 LOWELL

A lady who attended the lecture de- son, D. D., president of the Union The ological seminary, New York, in the United church Sunday night on the subject Games Russell Lowell as Seen in His Lectures and Poems," says of it: ''The speaker added to a scholarly presence the attractive element of melodious voice of rare carrying power. The lecture was an able and apprecia- tive portraiture of the author of the "Bigelow Papers" and the audience paid the speaker the compliment of the most unwearied attention.
 After touching upon the great poet as conscientious letter writer who al- ways put his own personality into his writings, the speaker quoted Lowell as saying that every poem he wrote was to him letter to all the persons he held dear. Lowell, he said, like the other five of the great New England poets-Longfellow Holmes, Bryant, Emerson and Whittier-was first preacher, then a poet. He loved the beautiful, but he held it always in sub- jection to the law of righteousness. At the age of forty-one Lowell said he had preached enough to get down from the pulpit and go around among his pa- rishioners, but, he added, that he could not for New England was all meeting house when I grew up"
 Lowell, said the lecturer, was deeply religious by nature, yet he was not fond of going to church. At twenty five he said, T am affected less by the outward forms of religion and more by a feeling of confidence in God" At fifty, q take great comfort in God; l think he likes us and would not let us get so often at the matchbox were not his universe fire-proof." Of specula- tors in religious thought, he says: ..When they tell me l can't know cer- tain things, I ask them how they can be sure of that. I would not give up certain chapters in the Old Testament for all that science tells me 1 can know. Lowell had no mercy on the modern writer who drags his readers down morally. "No one should write a line" he said "that he should fear to have his daughter read"
 At fifty-nine the faith of the man was strong. "supposing we don't know" he said, "There is not much one does know, after all. One doubts ones own identity sometimes, and the very ground one walks on." Lowell said of himself that he combined two utterly distinct characters Half of me is mystic and enthusiast and the other half is humorous" He was visited by visions, but he never carried his myst1- sism into the realm of superstition With spirit-knockings and similar forms of "spiritualism" he had nc sympathy. q think God never takes needless trouble with us,' he said.
 Many of Lowell's poems are satura- ted with the spirit of the gospel. A be- liever in Christ, he yet had little good to say of the visible church. He had been disgusted with the coldness ano impiety of the church of his youth .sThe church. he said, 'is the great bulwark of practical Paganism which must be reformed" Slavery he con- sidered foul blot, most terrible dls- ease. an awful outrage, a most danger ous wrong Back in '5l Lowell said "such an error as the slave law weigh; ,ne down without a bound and makes mt unable to work we'll" Lowell has beer accused of being an Anglo-maniac, cynical. un-American pessimist. fe from Europe he wrote "The more se' of the old world the more l like the new" From Madrid he wrote, T llk America better every day" He neve hesitated to criticise English pretens' and snobbishness. And it was becaus he loved his own land that he neve essitsted to criticise it's mistakes.