Poetic Qualities.-Lowell is one of our finest nature poets; his feeling for nature, especially the gentler aspects, is delicate, one may almost say, dainty. "To the Dandelion," "dear common flower," is exquisite and heartfelt. He succeeded well with humorous verse and satire: there is nothing in American poetry just like the Fable for Critics, with its pungent and yet genial wit, and there is nothing in English or American poetry like The Biglow Papers. He is pre-eminently the poet of great occasions: patriotic celebrations, anniversaries of literary importance, political crises, found in Lowell a masterful and accomplished spokesman. His later verse has great dignity and distinction. He was able to coin portable and inspiring phrases, particularly for youth; as, for instance, his well-known line in "For an Autograph":

Greatly begin! though thou have time
But for a line, be that sublime,-

Not failure, but low aim, is crime.

His limitations are evident enough to the thoughtful reader: prosaic lines now and then lower the warmth and weaken the tone of his verse; his Elizabethan fondness for punning sometimes spoils an artistic effect; his lack of concreteness often leaves a vague impression, a defect doubtless due to his academic temper. His later poetry tends to become involved and abstract.

His Prose.-Four volumes contain the best of Lowell's prose work: Among My Books (1870), My Study Windows (1871), Among My Books, Second Series (1876), and Democracy and Other Addresses (1886). Some of these essays originally appeared in the two great magazines of which he was at different times the editor, some are addresses delivered in England and at home. They cover a wide range-Dante, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Spenser, Milton, Dryden, Pope, Keats, Wordsworth, Lessing, Rousseau, Carlyle, "My Garden

Acquaintance," "A Good Word for Winter," "On A Certain Condescension in Foreigners," "Democracy."

The first thing that impresses the reader of Lowell's essays is the immense fund of his ready information. His allusions are almost as numerous and bewildering as Macaulay's. His literary essays are generally on individuals, but one is more interested in the man who is treating them-in his fresh, inspiring enthusiasm,-than in the subjects dicussed. Lowell pours out for you his varied knowledge in endless profusion, illuminating it with happy turns of thought, flashes of wit, and scattering over his pages with prodigal carelessness jewels or flowers gathered from a thousand fields. On his subject his rich fancy plays until you see it as he sees it. That is what he wishes you to do. He is not methodic; sometimes he seems pedantic; again he is full of caprice, and keeps you guessing as to what he may say next. If he cannot find a word to suit him, he unhesitatingly coins one, and you will understand it if perchance you are well versed in literatures and languages, but you will hardly find it in the dictionary. In any case, he will stimulate you to read more; his tricksy turns of phrase, his brilliant epigrams, even his puns, will amuse you, stir your imagination, or make you think. No other American critic has been able to talk more brilliantly and intimately on apparently threadbare literary subjects.

Like Matthew Arnold, Lowell used the comparative and appreciative method in literary criticism; his wide reading and trustworthy memory enabled him to draw on several literatures for illustrations and to quote apposite sayings from any given writer. His essay on Dante, for instance, though too long for most readers, is better than a formal treatise for any one who really wants to catch the spirit of Dante. The essay on Chaucer gives an insight into that poet which more scholastic and more technically exact dissertations do not furnish. Indeed, one might begin with this essay, as has been suggested, and by reading in order the other poets discussed by

Lowell down to Wordsworth, gain a respectable knowledge of the development of English poetry from the Renaissance to modern times. He who appreciatively reads Lowell's essays might be said to be liberally educated. They are not particularly easy reading, for they demand intelligent concentration and presuppose culture, but they are so bright and so human withal that they abundantly repay the effort they at first cost. A few quotations from the essays will illustrate, though inadequately, Lowell's way of saying things:

With Dante the main question is the saving of the soul, with Chaucer it is the conduct of life.

The young demand thoughts that find an echo in their real and not their acquired nature, and care very little about the dress they are put in. It is later that we learn to like the conventional, as we do olives.

The aim of the artist is psychologic, not historic truth.

Talent is that which is in a man's power; genius is that in whose power a man is.

The foolish and the dead alone never change their opinion.

Lowell was one of the most patriotic of men, as his notable address on "Democracy," delivered in Birmingham, England, in 1884, shows. This speech gave to Englishmen a clearer conception of American democracy than any other discussion of that subject they had heard or read. It has, in truth, become a classic utterance, which every American should read. Its dominant note is idealistic and optimistic; the following sentence expresses a fundamental sentiment in his political creed: "I believe that the real will never find an irremovable basis until it rests on the ideal." Out of the basal moral element in his character sprang the nobility of his own ideals. General Estimate.-Lowell is the most versatile of American literary men. He was editor, teacher, diplomat, reformer, public speaker, poet, and essayist; in all these activities he

acquitted nimself with credit, in most of them with rare distinction. That he did so many things well may have kept him from being supremely great in any one thing. He knew a great deal and had a remarkable facility of expression; he is the most broadly cultured of our writers. In the field of literary criticism, only one other among our standard authors can justly be named along with him, and that is Edgar Allan Poe; and Lowell was better equipped than Poe. Like Poe, too, he succeeded equally well in both poetry and prose, but he lacks the genius of Poe. With his extraordinary gifts and his almost universal culture, Lowell somehow just missed being a genius. He had not the patience necessary to the most enduring fruits of genius; he wrought too rapidly, and he failed to use the file; revision and suppression would have helped. But when all is said, the impressive fact remains that Lowell is our best rounded literary man.

OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES (1809-1894)

His Life. Oliver Wendell Holmes came of a long line of distinguished ancestry, among whom were the Phillipses, the Wendells, the Hancocks, the Quincys, and the Bradstreets. From Anne Bradstreet, the first American poetess, he was directly descended. These names are prominent in the political, religious, and literary history of Massachusetts. Holmes was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, August 29, 1809, birthyear of half a dozen noted men. The house of his father, pastor of the First Church, stood near the Harvard yard-"the house with the gambrel roof," mentioned frequently in Holmes's writings. Young Holmes was educated at Phillips Andover Academy and at Harvard, from which he graduated in the famous class of '29, so often celebrated by him in verse. At the Harvard Law School he studied a year, then turned to medicine, carrying on his studies two years abroad, mostly in Paris, and graduating at the Harvard Medical School in 1836. During the next four years he was occasionally composing poetry, writing on medical subjects, and lecturing for a while at Dartmouth College, New Hampshire. In 1840 he began to practice medicine in Boston; that same year he married Miss Amelia Lee Jackson. In 1847 he became Professor of Anatomy and Physiology at the Harvard Medical School, and held this position as active and emeritus professor until his death forty-seven years later.

In 1857 the Atlantic Monthly was established, with James Russell Lowell as its first editor. This position was accepted by Lowell on condition that Holmes, who had named the new magazine, should be a regular contributor. In the first number he accordingly began his well-known "Breakfast Table" series. Lowell remarked later in his characteristic vein: "You see the Doctor is like a bright mountain stream that has been dammed up among the hills, and is waiting for an outlet into the Atlantic." To Holmes, in truth, this great periodical owes much in the formation of that high literary character which has always distinguished it. From this time on Holmes became more distinctly a man of letters, though his regular profession did not suffer through his interest in literature. Many of his best poems were written in the twenty years following his first connection with the Atlantic Monthly in 1857; some of the most familiar of these first appeared in the contributions later published as the "Breakfast Table" volumes. Of the poems independently issued, those on his class reunions-annually celebrated in verse for thirty-nine years-form a notable series.