This was a noble life and a noble death, worthy of much thought and admiration from all men. Yet this is not all. It is well for us to see how such a man looked upon what he was doing, and what it meant to him. Lowell was one of the silent heroes so much commended by Carlyle. He never wrote of himself or his own exploits. As some one well said, he had "the impersonality of genius." But in a few remarkable passages in his private letters, we can see how the meaning of life and of that great time unrolled itself before his inner eyes. In June, 1861, he wrote:

I cannot say I take any great pleasure in the contemplation of the future. I fancy you feel much as I do about the profitableness of a soldier's life, and would not think of trying it, were it not for a muddled and twisted idea that somehow or other this fight was going to be one in which decent men ought to engage for the sake of humanity,-I use the word in its ordinary sense. It seems to me that within a year the slavery question will again take a prominent place, and that many cases will arise in which we may get fearfully in the wrong if we put our cause wholly in the hands of fighting men and foreign legions.

In June, 1863, he wrote:

I wonder whether my theories about self-culture, etc., would ever have been modified so much, whether I should ever have seen what a necessary failure they lead to, had it not been for this war. Now I feel every day, more and more, that a man has no right to himself at all; that, indeed, he can do nothing useful unless he recognizes this clearly.

Here again, on July 3, is a sentence which it is well to take to heart, and for all men to remember when their ears are deafened with the cry that war, no matter what the cause, is the worst thing possible, because it interferes with comfort, trade, and money-making: "Wars are bad," Lowell writes, "but there are many things far worse. Anything immediately comfortable in our affairs I don't see; but comfortable times are not the ones that make a nation great." On July 24, he says:

Many nations fail, that one may become great; ours will fail, unless we gird up our loins and do humble and honest days' work, without trying to do the thing by the job, or to get a great nation made by a patent process. It is not safe to say that we shall not have victories till we are ready for them. We shall have victories, and whether or no we are ready for them depends upon ourselves; if we are not ready, we shall fail,voilà tout. If you ask, what if we do fail? I have nothing to say; I should n't cry over a nation or two, more or less, gone under.

Finally, on September 10, a little more than a month before his death, he wrote to a disabled officer:

I hope that you are going to live like a plain republican, mindful of the beauty and of the duty of simplicity. Nothing fancy now, sir, if you please; it's disreputable to spend money when the government is so hard up, and when there are so many poor officers. I hope that you have outgrown all foolish ambitions, and are now content to become a "useful citizen." Don't

grow rich; if you once begin, you will find it much more difficult to be a useful citizen. Don't seek office, but don't "disremember" that the "useful citizen" always holds his time, his trouble, his money, and his life ready at the hint of his country. The useful citizen is a mighty, unpretending hero; but we are not going to have any country very long, unless such heroism is developed. There, what a stale sermon I'm preaching. But, being a soldier, it does seem to me that I should like nothing so well as being a useful citizen. Well, trying to be one, I mean. I shall stay in the service, of course, till the war is over, or till I'm disabled; but then I look forward to a pleas

anter career.

I believe I have lost all my ambitions. I don't think I would turn my hand to be a distinguished chemist or a famous mathematician. All I now care about is to be a useful citizen, with money enough to buy bread and firewood, and to teach my children to ride on horseback, and look strangers in the face, especially Southern strangers.

There are profound and lofty lessons of patriotism and conduct in these passages, and a very noble philosophy of life and duty both as a man and as a citizen of a great republic. They throw a flood of light on the great underlying forces which enabled the American people to save themselves in that time of storm and stress. They are the utterances of a very young man, not thirty years old when he died in battle, but much beyond thirty in head and heart, tried and taught as he had been in a great war. What precisely such young men thought they were fighting for is put strikingly by Lowell's younger brother James,

who was killed at Glendale, July 4, 1862. In 1861, James Lowell wrote to his classmates, who had given him a sword:

Those who died for the cause, not of the Constitution and the laws, a superficial cause, the rebels have now the same, --but of civilization and law, and the self-restrained freedom which is their result. As the Greeks at Marathon and Salamis, Charles Martel and the Franks at Tours, and the Germans at the Danube, saved Europe from Asiatic barbarism, so we, at places to be famous in future times, shall have saved America from a similar tide of barbarism; and we may hope to be purified and strengthened ourselves by the struggle.

This is a remarkable passage and a deep thought. Coming from a young fellow of twentyfour, it is amazing. But the fiery trial of the times taught fiercely and fast, and James Lowell, just out of college, could see in the red light around him that not merely the freedom of a race and the saving of a nation were at stake, but that behind all this was the forward movement of civilization, brought once again to the arbitrament of the sword. Slavery was barbarous and barbarizing. It had dragged down the civilization of the South to a level from which it would take generations to rise up again. Was this barbarous force now to prevail in the United States in the nineteenth century? Was it to destroy a great nation, and fetter human progress in the New World? That was the great question back of, beyond and

above all. Should this force of barbarism sweep conquering over the land, wrecking an empire in its onward march, or should it be flung back as Miltiades flung back Asia at Marathon, and Charles Martel stayed the coming of Islam at Tours? The brilliant career, the shining courage, best seen always where the dead were lying thickest, the heroic death of Charles Lowell, are good for us all to know and to remember. Yet this imperfect story of his life has not been placed here for these things alone. Many thousand others, officers and soldiers alike, in the great Civil War gave their lives as freely as he, and brought to the service of their country the best that was in them. He was a fine example of many who, like him, offered up all they had for their country. But Lowell was also something more than this. He was a high type of a class, and a proof of certain very important things, and this is a point worthy of much consideration.

The name of John Hampden stands out in the history of the English-speaking people, admired and unquestioned. He was neither a great statesman, nor a great soldier; he was not a brilliant orator, nor a famous writer. He fell bravely in an unimportant skirmish at Chalgrove Field, fighting for freedom and what he believed to be right. Yet he fills a great place in the past, both for what he did and what he was, and the reason for