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 as his English predecessors looked upon the 'enthusiasts' of their day. One of his most characteristic letters is a very courteous reply, written in 1846, to a remonstrance from Lowell, who had complained that he did not attack war and slavery in his poems. He does not differ from Lowell in his judgment of those evils; but he must follow his natural bent, and was glad to leave these burning problems to more eloquent advocates. It is quite clear, in fact, that his natural predisposition made believers in what we call 'fads' uncongenial. He saw their absurdities, their one-sided extravagances, and their appeals to a kind of inspired authority from the common-sense point of view. Their vehemence and their blindness to the practical shocked his taste and kept him for the time at arm's-length. And so, in spite of his thorough patriotism, he was, in some directions, a conservative and even an aristocrat. He was for 'Americanising' religion–– for that meant making religion reasonable; but not for Americanising literature, for the phrase had been used to mean vulgarising. 'I go politically for equality,' says he, 'and socially for the quality.' He wished, in short, to preserve the traditions of refinement and harmony, suavity