courage, and even the sincerity of mind requisite for an elevation of the level. What did he do for the level of private thinking? Even poor Clough, according to Norton, had an intellectual integrity which Lowell lacked. "He was too intellectually sincere to hold the old beliefs in spite of himself, as Lowell tries to do." A docile man of the world himself, Norton remarks that when Lowell appeared in Paris he "managed to make the Quais and the Rue de Rivoli mere continuations of Brattle Street. I wish he had come abroad ten years ago." A genial and lovable man Lowell was and a fine example of American manhood; yet in the eyes of one of the friends who loved him best he was something too much of the flattered don, of the self-indulgent antiquarian, and of the plausible afterdinner speaker ever to feel the necessity of bringing himself and his culture thoroughly abreast of the modern world. This verdict, reluctantly arrived at, and collectible from Norton's letters, was publicly reaffirmed by Mr. Greenslet in his Life of Lowell, 1905, and again in a brilliantly authoritative fashion by Mr. Brownell himself in American Prose Masters.
The place in the history of American culture formerly occupied by Emerson might have been taken in succession by Lowell, had he ever brought his fine talents, as Mr. Hoover would say, "up to the emery-wheel of competition," had he strenuously kept himself in touch with "the best knowledge, the best ideas of his time." As a matter of
