come to us in two distinct ways: the past is at rest in books; the present is throbbing all about us. To understand either we must keep the other in mind; we must illustrate books by experience, and to correct the errors of experience we must retreat and observe them from regions to which only books can take us. Again, there are aspects in which both books and life seem profoundly serious; yet there are other aspects in which even the most serious phases of both seem whimsically absurd. And truly to understand the complex unity of humanity you must somehow fuse all these, life and books, sublimity and humour, light and twilight and shadow.

The fact that Lowell was constantly sensitive to incompatible impressions was not his only temperamental obstacle. The well-known circumstance that he was amateurishly unable satisfactorily to revise his writing indicates how completely he was possessed by each of his various moods, which often chased one another in bewildering confusion, yet again left him for prolonged intervals in what seemed to him states of hopeless stagnation. Throughout all this uncertainty, however, one can feel in his literary temper two constant, antagonistic phases. His purity of taste was quite equal to Longfellow's; particularly as he grew older, he eagerly delighted in those phases of literature which are excellent. Yet all the while he was incessantly impelled to whimsical extravagance of thought, feeling, and utterance. Whoever knew him as a teacher, then, must often have found him disconcerting. At one moment his comment on the text would be full of sympathetic insight; at the next, as likely as not, he would make an atrocious pun; and he would take a boyishly perverse delight in watching the effect on his pupils of his spontaneous incongruities. The trait appears in his fondness for cramming his published essays with obscure allusions to unheard of oddities in the byways of literature and history. If one took these seriously, they would be abominably pedantic; who under the sun, for example, was Abraham à Sancta Clara

whom Lowell dragged into that opening passage of his essay on Thoreau? In fact, however, this mannerism was only a rather juvenile prank. Life puzzled Lowell, and in revenge Lowell amused himself by puzzling the people he talked to or wrote for. It is no wonder that this paradoxical conflict between purity of taste and mischievous extravagance of temper retarded his maturity until he had grown to the ripeness of nearly sixty years.

His impulsively volatile temperament, again, involved somewhat unusual sensitiveness to the influences which from time to time surrounded him. Early in life he married a woman remarkable alike for charms and for gifts, who was enthusiastically devoted to the reforms then in the air. It was partly due to her influence, apparently, that Lowell for a while proved so hot-headed a reformer. After her premature death this phase of his temper became less evident. It was revived, of course, by the passionate days of Civil War, when he upheld extreme Northern sentiments with all his might; and the depth of his experience finally resulted in that "Commemoration Ode" at Harvard which chiefly entitles him to consideration as a serious poet. Yet this ode itself, though said to have been quickly written and little revised, is marked rather by exceptionally sustained seriousness of feeling than by anything which seems simply, sensuously passionate. One of the traits for which you must search Lowell's volumes long is lyrical spontaneity. An extravagant contemporary critic once declared in conversation that he had no more afflatus than a tortoise. In this extravagance there is a touch of truth, but only a touch. The real Lowell was a man of deep, but constantly various and whimsically incongruous, emotional nature, whose impulse to expression was constantly hampered by all manner of importunate external impressions.

For all this, the chances are that, like Longfellow, Lowell would have been apt to consider himself most seriously as a poet; and work classed among his poems most clearly ex

presses his individuality. His first volume of verse appeared in 1841, three years after his graduation, and in 1844 and In these there is 1848 he published other such volumes. nothing particularly characteristic. Honest, careful, sincere enough, the work seems; but except for the eminence finally attained by its author little of it would attract attention to-day. This kind of thing reached its acme in the "Vision of Sir Launfal," published in 1848. The familiar stanza from the prelude to Part I. is typical of the whole:

"And what is so rare as a day in June?
Then, if ever come perfect days;
Then Heaven tries earth if it be in tune,
And over it softly her warm ear lays;
Whether we look or whether we listen,

We hear life murmur, or see it glisten;
Every clod feels a stir of might,

An instinct within it that reaches and towers,
And groping blindly above it for light,

Climbs to a soul in grass and flowers;

The flush of life may well be seen

Thrilling back over hills and valleys;
The cowslip startles in meadows green,

The buttercup catches the sun in its chalice,
And there's never a leaf nor a blade too mean
To be some happy creature's palace;
The little bird sits at his door in the sun,

Atilt like a blossom among the leaves,

And lets his illumined being o'errun

With the deluge of summer that it receives;
His mate feels the eggs beneath her wings.

And the heart in her dumb breast flutters and sings;

He sings to the wide world, and she to her nest,

In the nice ear of Nature which song is the best?"

Here is a man who has read a great deal of poetry, and who is thus impelled to write. Somewhat in the mood of Wordsworth to whom three stanzas before he has alluded - he tries to express the impression made upon him by nature. He succeeds only in making nature seem a pretty phase of litera

ture. It is all very serious, no doubt, and sweet in purpose; but it is never spontaneously lyric.

The "Vision of Sir Launfal" was published in 1848. In that same year came two other publications which show a very different Lowell; one is the " Fable for Critics," the other the first collection of the "Biglow Papers," which had begun to appear in the Boston "Courier " two years earlier. In a study like ours, the "Fable for Critics," of which we have already had a taste or two, is a useful document. Ten years

out of college and already a professional writer, alertly alive to the contemporary condition of American letters, Lowell at last permitted himself to write about them, under a thin disguise of anonymity, with unrestricted freedom. The result

is queer. It now seems wonderful that any human being

could ever have had patience to read the poem through. The fable, so far as there is any, proves as commonplace as the "Vision of Sir Launfal;" and, besides, it is bewilderingly lost in such amateurishly extravagant whimsicality and pedantry as hampered Lowell all his life. At the same time, his portraits of contemporary American writers, in many cases made long before their best work was done, are marked not only by a serious critical spirit, but by acute Yankee good sense, and by surprising felicity of idiomatic phrase. The people he touches on are flung together pellmell, amid allusions which would have taxed the ingenuity of Burton, and rhymes which would have put Samuel Butler to the blush, and puns which half rekindle the Calvinistic embers of eternal punishment. Over-minuteness never more tediously defeated its probable intention of amusing. Yet, to go no further, you can rarely find more suggestive criticism anywhere than what the "Fable for Critics" says of Emerson, Theodore Parker, Bryant, Whittier, Hawthorne, Cooper, Poe, Longfellow, Willis, Irving, or Holmes. It is good criticism, too, sincerely stating the impression made on a singularly alert contemporary mind by writers who have now acquired

what they did not then surely possess, a fair prospect of permanence; and the very fantastic oddity of its style, which makes prolonged sessions with it so tiresome, has a touch not only of native Yankee temper but of incontestable individuality. At last permitting himself the full license of extravagant, paradoxical form, Lowell revealed all his amateurish faults; but he revealed too all those peculiar contradictory qualities which made the true Lowell a dozen men at once. Nobody else could have written quite this thing, and it was worth writing.

More worth writing still, and equally characteristic, were the "Biglow Papers," which were collected at about the same time. They were written during the troubles of the Mexican War. The slave States had plunged the country into that armed aggression, which excited as never before the full fervour of the antislavery feeling in the North. Just at this time the influence of Lowell's wife made his antislavery convictions strongest. No technical form could seem much less literary than that in which he chose to express his passionate sentiments. Using the dialect of his native Yankee country, and emphasising its oddities of pronunciation by every extravagance of misspelling, he produced a series of verses which have an external aspect of ephemeral popularity. At first glance, the laborious humour of Parson Wilbur's pedantry, and the formally interminable phrases in which he imbeds it, seem radically different from the lines on which they comment. As you ponder on them, however, Wilbur's elaborately overstudied prose and the dialect verse of Hosea Biglow and Birdo'-Freedom Sawin fall into the same category. Both prove so deliberate, both so much matters of detail, that in the end your impression may well be, that, taken all in all, each paper is tediously ingenious. No one number of the " Biglow Papers" is so long as the "Fable for Critics; " but none is much easier to read through.

In the "Biglow Papers," at the same time, just as in the "Fable for Critics," you feel constant flashes of Lowell's