Frank Preston Stearns, Cambridge Sketches

[96] it sharp. He would be more likely to say: “Pleasure does make us Yankee kind er winch, as if 'twas suthina paid for by the inch.” There are other instances of similar sort; but, nevertheless, if the primitive Yankee should become extinct, as now seems very probable, Lowell's masterly portrait of him will remain, and future generations can reconstruct him from it, as Agassiz reconstructed an extinct species of mammal from fossil bones.

Lowell did not join the Free-soilers, who were now bearing the brunt of the anti-slavery conflict, but attached himself to the more aristocratic wing of the old abolitionists, which was led by Edmund Quincy, Maria Chapman, and L. Maria Child. Lowell was far from being a non-resistant. In fact, he might be called a fighting-man, although he disapproved of duelling; and this served to keep him at a distance from Garrison, of whom he wisely remarked that “the nearer public opinion approached to him the further he retreated into the isolation of his own private opinions.” He wrote regularly for the Anti-Slavery Standard until 1851, when the death of his father-in-law supplied the long-desired means for a journey to Italy,--more desired perhaps for his wife's health than for his own gratification. It may be the fault of his biographers, but I cannot discover that Lowell took any share in the opposition