I do not
suppose it was the "common man" of Lincoln's dream that Lowell thought
America was unfaithful to, though as I have suggested he could be tender
of the common man's hopes in her; but he was impeaching in that blotted
line her sincerity with the uncommon man: the man who had expected of her
a constancy to the ideals of her youth end to the high martyr-moods of
the war which had given an unguarded and bewildering freedom to a race of
slaves. He was thinking of the shame of our municipal corruptions, the
debased quality of our national statesmanship, the decadence of our whole
civic tone, rather than of the increasing disabilities of the
hard-working poor, though his heart when he thought of them was with
them, too, as it was in "the time when the slave would not let him
sleep."
He spoke very rarely of those times, perhaps because their political and
social associations were so knit up with the saddest and tenderest
personal memories, which it was still anguish to touch. Not only was he
"--not of the race
That hawk, their sorrows in the market place,"
but so far as my witness went he shrank from mention of them.
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