Percival Lowell — an afterglow. Wrexie Louise Leonard

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Название Percival Lowell — an afterglow
Автор произведения Wrexie Louise Leonard
Жанр Языкознание
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Издательство Языкознание
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isbn 4064066066031



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passion. Frequently, he smilingly quoted the saying: "The only excuse for a dinner is the cigar that follows."

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      III

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      Possessed of splendid enthusiasms all phases of life interested him. His jocular moods were delightful. The following extract from a letter received by the author from one of Dr. Lowell's Oxford friends will show how this trait of the many-sided man strongly impressed itself upon those about him:—

      " … I well remember the first or it may be the second time he was at this house. I had a lot of boys here, as I often do, lassoing and shooting in the garden, and the eager boyish way in which he joined them and shot and ran too, and the echo of his laughter as he did it is one of the pleasantest memories of the garden that come back to me. Also, I like to think of him at Flagstaff and the very happy fortnight when I enjoyed his hospitality there. Do you remember how we all tested our unaided eyesight on the big advertisement stuck up on the side of a drygoods store in Flagstaff—we trying to draw it from the outside of the Observatory, and not verifying it with the telescope till we each had had a shot?"

      Driven to his piazza one rainy day to lunch, because of alterations in the dining room, he jocosely named the picture on page 22—taken then—"A Silly-Wet Day!" He was a wit. His bon mots kept his guests in laughter. His dinner stories were sans pareils; sans reproches.

      ​At one time, before enclosing the Observatory grounds at Flagstaff, cows, horses and burros from the town took pleasure in coming up the trail, sheep fashion, to trespass there: much to the annoyance of the Director. To an English servant, he had at the time, he said: "Harry, if these intruders come up again get out your shot-gun and pepper them." Harry, with his correct manners, promptly and politely replied, "Yes, sir." Dr. Lowell forgot the incident until the next day, when he received a telephone message from the owner of a Jersey cow that his servant had peppered her with shot. This literal obedience cost Dr. Lowell several dollars, but he treated it gaily.

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Percival Lowell - an afterglow - A Silly-Wet Day.jpg

      "A SILLY-WET DAY"

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      IV

       Table of Contents

      His best friend in the far West was Judge Edward M. Doe, of Flagstaff; and his own words: "We insensibly find those persons congenial whose ideas resemble ours, and gravitate to them as leaves on a pond do to one another, nearer and nearer until they touch," are exemplified by this friendship. He found there, in the wilds, this learned gentleman. And his greatest delight was to dine with him, picnic, climb the mountains, scan the cañons, or what not, and discuss at large with him subjects of law. Indeed so well versed was Dr. Lowell, legally, that an outsider overhearing these conversations would have thought him a member of the bar or mistaken him for a judge himself.

      Hundreds of people have felt the spell of Dr. Lowell's personal magnetism. So puissant was it that his presence was often felt even

       before

      he entered the room! He himself has said: "About certain people there exists a subtle something which leaves its impress indelibly upon the consciousness of all who come in contact with them. This something is a power, but a power of so indefinable a description that we beg definition by calling it simply the personality of the man. It is not a matter of subsequent reasoning, but of direct perception. We feel it. Sometimes it charms us; sometimes it repels. But we can no more be oblivious to it than we can to the temperature of the air. Its possessor

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      has but to enter the room, and insensibly we are conscious of a presence. It is as if we had suddenly been placed in a field of a magnetic force." This but partially portrays his own personal force; and while the splendor of it is now gone, his most intimate friends still feel the charm and potency of his personality persisting adown the years.

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Percival Lowell - an afterglow - As a Harvard Student.jpg

      AS A HARVARD STUDENT

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      V

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      His mind was, it is said, incomparably brilliant. His "mental altitudes" helped make the name Lowell illustrious. Soon after his graduation from Harvard, his cousin, James Russell Lowell, spoke of him as the "most brilliant man in Boston" and his later years brought only a fuller flowering of his early superior genius. His books have been translated into foreign languages, including even Chinese. And in his lectures: in these, as through a rift in the clouds like a star, he shone, while his audiences sat spellbound. He was a marvel to those who heard him. Many will remember that in his last lecture course before the Lowell Institute in Boston (later crystallized into permanent form), standing room was nil, and demands for admission were so numerous and insistent that repetitions were arranged for the evenings. At these repeated lectures the streets near by were filled with motors and carriages as if it were grand opera night! At the termination of this magnificent course there appeared in the Boston Transcript "Percival Lowell's Q. E. D." in which the writer said: "Lowell's lectures on Mars are among the most memorable ever delivered at that Institute, bearing his family name, which has commanded the services of the most eminent of the world's scholars in all lines of thought and research. He has bridged the gap which astronomers pointed out years ago in his ​revelations concerning Mars between the condition of habitability and that of being inhabited. … This is a brave and brilliant débût for the new science, or rather new department of astronomy which Professor Lowell has named 'planetology,' and which is to concern itself rather with the development and life of the planets themselves than with their external relations, their place in a system, their period of revolution, or their cosmic origin and destiny in the scheme of the universe. Is there another planet, however, upon which there is any present opportunity to pursue planetological studies with equal facilities and the probability of similarly brilliant rewards? With Mars the deductions from postulates and analogies drawn from terrestrial data and laws could be confirmed from certain visible facts. But if there be no other as promising field, Mr. Lowell's wisdom in concentrating on Mars is justified the more and the thanks of the world have been well earned by his devotion to it." A fitting appreciation this is of Dr. Lowell's masterful achievements.

      Another writer referred to a page in his "Mars" as the most brilliant one in literature. He said:

      " … As I was watching the planet, I saw suddenly two points like stars flash out in the midst of the polar cap. Dazzlingly bright upon the duller white background of the snow, these stars shone for a few moments and then slowly disappeared. The seeing at the time was very good. It is at once evident what the other-world apparitions were—​not the fabled signal-lights of Martian folk, but the glint of ice-slopes flashing for a moment earthward as the rotation of the planet turned the slope to the proper angle; just as, in sailing by some glass-windowed house near set of sun, you shall for a moment or two catch a dazzling glint of glory from its panes, which then vanishes as it came. But though no intelligence lay behind the action of these lights, they were none the less startling for being Nature's own flash-lights across one hundred millions of miles of space. It had taken them nine minutes to make the journey; nine minutes before they reached the Earth they had ceased to be on Mars, and, after their travel of one hundred millions of miles, found to note them but one watcher, alone on a hilltop with the dawn."

      Dr.