ce between Hollis and
Holden he read his "Commemoration Ode." He wrote to President Hill in 1863:
"Something ought to be done about the trees in the Yard." He loved the
place. It was here in Sanders Theatre that he pronounced his memorable
address at the two hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the founding of the
College--an address rich in historic background, and not without solicitude
for the future of his favorite humanistic studies--a solicitude, some will
think, only too well justified. "Cambridge at all times is full of ghosts,"
said Emerson. But no ghost from the past, flitting along the Old Road from
Elmwood to the Yard, and haunting the bleak lecture-rooms where it had
recited as a careless boy and taught wearily as a man, could wear a more
quizzical and friendly aspect than Lowell's. He commonly spoke of his life
as a professor with whimsical disparagement, as Henry Adams wrote of his
own teaching with a somewhat cynical disparagement. But the fact is that
both of these self-depreciating New Englanders were stimulating and
valuable teachers. From his happily idle boyhood to the close of his
fruitful career, Lowell's loyalty to Cambridge and Harvard was unalterable.
Other tastes changed after wider experience with the world. He even
preferred, at last, the English blackbird to the American bobolink, but the
Harvard Quinquennial Catalogue never lost its savor, and in the full tide
of his social success in London he still thought that the society he had
enjoyed at the Saturday Club was the best society in the world. To
deracinate Lowell was impossible, and it was for this very reason that he
became so serviceable an international personage. You knew where he stood.
It was not for nothing that his roots ran down two hundred years deep. He
was the incarnation of his native soil.

Lowell has recently been described, together with Whittier, Emerson, and
others, as an "English provincial poet--in the sense that America still was
a literary province of the mother country." To this amazing statement one
can only rejoin that if "The Biglow Papers," the "Harvard Commemoration
Ode," "Under the Old Elm," the "Fourth of July Ode," and the Agassiz elegy
are English provincial poetry, most of us need a new map and a new
vocabulary. Of both series of "Biglow Papers" we may surely exclaim, as did
Quintilian concerning early Roman satire, "This is wholly ours." It is true
that Lowell, like every young poet of his generation, had s