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[48]
in pronouncing on the whole life of a man whom he had personally known for less than half that life.
It is this point and this only which I should venture to criticise.
Mr. Smalley says of Lowell: “He came to London the man he had been all his life long . . a thinker, a dreamer, a poet, almost a recluse.”
But for the phrase “all his life long” this would be very true; yet he certainly was not born a recluse, nor did he begin his career like one.
As for birth and inheritance, his mother had Irish blood in her, and had, by the descriptions of those who knew her, the Irish temperament-gay, warm-hearted, impulsive, social-all these being qualities which her son inherited.
From his father he had a more strenuous quality; but the Rev. Dr. Lowell was a man of sufficiently mild clericalism to preach sermons only fifteen minutes long, and this in a Congregational pulpit.
He had, moreover, a sense of humor, for no one without it would have finally silenced a woman made garrulous by bereavement, and steadfastly refusing all consolation-“But, after all, my dear madam, what do you expect to do about it?”
Lowell did not, therefore, inherit recluse qualities.
As a school-boy he was the gayest of the gay. In college he was the wit of his
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