mankind also,
to his side. So strong and so persuasive is honest manliness without a
single quality of romance or unreal sentiment to help it! A civilian
during times of the most captivating military achievement, awkward,
with no skill in the lower technicalities of manners, he left behind
him a fame beyond that of any conqueror, the memory of a grace higher
than that of outward person, and of a gentlemanliness deeper than mere
breeding. Never before that startled April morning did such multitudes
of men shed tears for the death of one they had never seen, as if with
him a friendly presence had been taken away from their lives, leaving
them colder and darker. Never was funeral panegyric so eloquent as the
silent look of sympathy which strangers exchanged when they met on that
day. Their common manhood had lost a kinsman.

DEMOCRACY

INAUGURAL ADDRESS ON ASSUMING THE PRESIDENCY OF THE
BIRMINGHAM AND MIDLAND INSTITUTE, BIRMINGHAM,
ENGLAND, 6 OCTOBER, 1884

Copyright, 1886. by JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL
Published by arrangement with Houghton Mifflin Company.

He must be a born leader or misleader of men, or must have been sent into
the world unfurnished with that modulating and restraining balance-wheel
which we call a sense of humor, who, in old age, has as strong a
confidence in his opinions and in the necessity of bringing the universe
into conformity with them as he had in youth. In a world the very
condition of whose being is that it should be in perpetual flux, where
all seems mirage, and the one abiding thing is the effort to distinguish
realities from appearances, the elderly man must be indeed of a
singularly tough and valid fibre who is certain that he has any clarified
residuum of experience, any assured verdict of reflection, that deserves
to be called an opinion, or who, even if he had, feels that he is
justified in holding mankind by the button while he is expounding it.
And in a world of daily--nay, almost hourly--journalism, where every
clever man, every man who thinks himself clever, or whom anybody else
thinks clever, is called upon to deliver his judgment point-blank and at
the word of command on every conceivable subject of human thought, or on
what sometimes seems to him very much the same thing, on every
inconceivable display of human want of thought, there is such a
spendthrift waste of all those commonplaces which furnish the permitted
staple of public discourse that there i