of Hosea's friend, the Rev. Homer Wilbur. Lowell's essay on Carlyle measures exactly the place in nineteenth-century thought that now, looking back, we can see Carlyle had come to at that time. If some readers of modern poetry have fallen out with Pope, Lowell's essay will incite them to read Pope again and learn his unique excellence. The paper "On a Certain Condescension in Foreigners" is ultimate criticism of all books by all people, especially Englishmen, on countries where the writers do not live.

Lowell has the true essayist's inability to stick to his subject. Apropos of a book or a writer he talks of anything that happens to be suggested to him. This quality makes him an excellent letter-writer and as his friends report him, a delightful talker, natural king in the easy-chair throne. Some formalistic critics, who seem to think that the whole universe of literature depends on their saying just the right thing, object too strongly to Lowell's habit of kicking up his heels in the midst of a fine passage. Lamb, the greatest of critics, does the same thing. It comes from irrepressible high spirits, delight in life, which is a good thing in literature, and is correspondingly good in the criticism of literature. No other writer about books after Lamb and Hazlitt is more continuously readable than Lowell. His very prejudices are entertaining; they lead him to some bold hard hitting which, we are told, passed out of good society with the days of Macaulay and Poe; perhaps that is the reason some of us read Macaulay and Poe in preference to critics of finer amenity. Lowell always talks like an honest man, never like a literary poseur. His affectations are not really affec

tations, for he expects you to know what he is doing, to playact with him in a momentary interruption before he goes on again with the lesson in hand. He tells what books mean to him, not what they ought to mean to him because some other critic has said so. He is capable of fine eloquence, and he has a habit of bringing his eloquence quickly down by whimsical change of mood. He has variety of style because he has variety of feelings. The irregularities of his prose are due not wholly to carelessness, but partly to exuberance and to the impulsive pursuit of his idea.

All Lowell's prose is good to read. One volume of it is indispensable to an American, the "Political Essays." We can read somebody else's essays on Gray and Keats, but no one of the time has left us a better volume of its kind than Lowell's papers on political affairs. In 1888 when he collected them he wrote:

"In looking at them again after so long an interval (for the latest of them is more than twenty years old) it gratifies me to find so little to regret in their tone, and that I was able to keep my head fairly clear of passion when my heart was at boiling point."

Like Mazzini and Phillips, Lowell preaches God and the People. Later he clung to God but drew away from the people. The foolish charge of Anglomania once brought against him was a poor return for his adequate services in Spain and England, which he gave as a matter of conscience when he would rather have been back in his library. But that charge is merely a wrong way of putting what is true, that he had outlived his democracy. He saw, as he

believed, that the country was falling away from the ideals of Lincoln, and when he caricatured Wendell Phillips he did not see that he was taking a place analogous to that of cultivated gentlemen of an earlier time who wanted slavery let alone. The hot heart and cool head that enabled him to see Lincoln in 1864 and served him in his fine dignified polemic on the Seward-Johnson reaction, ceased to work together. It was a different man who in 1886 wrote "The Progress of the World," which is a demonstration that one man in the world had ceased to progress. He was no longer interested in the march toward any "New Jerusalem.” Never again in his last quarter century was he so strong, so truly the Lowell of "The Biglow Papers," as when he wrote in 1868:

"We have only to be unswervingly faithful to what is the true America of our hope and belief, and whatever is American will rise from one end of the country to the other instinctively to our side, with more than ample means of present succour and of final triumph. It is only by being loyal and helpful to Truth that men learn at last how loyal and helpful she can be to them."

BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

James Russell Lowell was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, February 22, 1819; he died there August 12, 1891. He graduated from Harvard in 1838. For a while he studied law. In 1844 he married Maria White; she died in 1853. He spent the years 1851-2, 1855 and 1856 in Europe. In 1857 he succeeded Longfellow as Smith Professor of Litera

ture in Harvard College, and held the chair for fifteen years. He married his second wife, Frances Dunlap, in 1857. He was the first editor of the Atlantic Monthly and in 1862 he became co-editor with Charles Eliot Norton of the North American Review. He was appointed minister to Spain in 1887 and was transferred to England in 1880. He was relieved of political duty in 1885 when Cleveland became president.

His principal works are: Poems, 1844, 1848; Conversations on Some of the Old Poets, 1845; The Biglow Papers, First Series, 1848; A Fable for Critics, 1848; Fireside Travels, 1864; Commemoration Ode, 1865; The Biglow Papers, Second Series, 1866; Under the Willows, 1869; The Cathedral 1869; Among My Books, 1870, 1876; My Study Windows, 1871; Three Memorial Poems, 1876; Democracy and Other Addresses, 1886; Heartsease and Rue, 1888; Political Essays, 1888; Latest Literary Essays and Addresses, 1891; The Old English Dramatists, 1892; Letters (edited by C. E. Norton), 1893.

The Life of Lowell by Mr. Ferris Greenslet is authentic. "Recollections and Appreciations" by Francis H. Underwood and "James Russell Lowell and His Friends" by Dr. E. E. Hale are delightful and personal. A good essay is that by Mr. Henry James in "Essays in London.”

CHAPTER XII

WHITMAN

The singers are welcomed, understood, appear often enough, but rare has the day been, likewise the spot, of the birth of the maker of poems, the Answerer.

Rhymes and rhymers pass away, poems distilled from poems pass

away,

The swarms of reflectors and the polite pass, and leave ashes, Admirers, importers, obedient persons, make but the soil of literature,

America justifies itself, give it time, no disguise can deceive it or conceal from it, it is impassive enough,

Only the likes of itself will advance to meet it,

If its poets appear it will in due time advance to meet them, there is no fear of mistake

(The proof of a poet shall be sternly deferred till his country absorbs him as affectionately as he has absorbed it).

ONLY one day in the century of American literature is marked by the birth of a "maker of poems, an Answerer"the day when Whitman was born. The history of Whitman, of his poetry and of the effect it has had on many kinds of men, is the history of the slow advance of democracy to meet its poets or one of its poets, for there shall be many. When "Leaves of Grass" appeared in 1855, it was welcomed by a few great liberal spirits, notably by Emerson. Later Whitman