with undissolved particles of prose, are lines and passages of pure and perfect poetry that give no uncertain taste of the quality of the poet Lowell might have been under more favoring stars, in an age more given to creating beauty and less to lecturing about it. How fresh is the image of these lines: "No rose, I doubt, was ever,1 like the first, A marvel to the bush it dawned upon;" how satisfying the large Cowleyesque cadence and accent of these, "I think man's soul dwells nearer to the east, how thrilling the invocation to Freedom,- ... Looking at Lowell's poetical achievement in the round, one thing is especially remarkable: it was best when least subjective; when instead of throwing the rein upon the neck of his fantasy, he curbed it and brought into harmonious play the aptitudes of the critic and humanist which were the other half of his genius. Considered by the approved standards of poetic art, his occasional poems, whether threnodies for Harvard youth slain in the war for nationality, for Queen 1 The comma is in all texts. Mercedes too early dead, or bookish pieces in a suave, frankly academic vein like “The Nightingale in the Study" or the lines to Longfellow on his birthday, outweigh all his moody lyric musings. And the flavor of the man was more fully expressed in them than in the pieces wherein he labored to express it. The multiplicity of Lowell's poetic manners has a little confused our judgment of his work, but as time goes on the winnowing suffrage of the years makes his work as a satirist, the mood in which he began, and to which he returned intermittently throughout his life, seem his most enduring poetic expression. With his yearning to be the poet of wonder, of the mystical moods of Nature and of the Soul, Lowell seems to have taken his satirical writing less and less seriously. Yet it may be doubted whether anything of his in the field of pure poetry has quite the poetic vitality of his excursions into the field of what may be called applied poetry. Little as he liked to be reminded of it in his later years, Lowell was the author of the "Biglow Papers," and it is as the author of the "Biglow Papers that he is likely to be longest remembered. It is needless to add anything here to what has already been said of the "Biglow Papers," of the first series and of the second. In variety, unction, quotability, ethical earnestness, humor, | wit, fun, even in pure poetry and pathos, they stand quite by themselves in American literature. Criticism cannot touch them. They are vital with the whole quality of a true man, and the patriotic emotion of a true people. For fifty years they have furnished delightful reading to thousands of American and English readers, and they will continue to furnish it. For even though the political allusions in them grow more and more misty with the years, their deep national quality, their literary salt, their tough homespun texture, will keep them from dusty corruption. It is needless to worry about what Lowell might have been as a poet under more propitious skies, with a little more single-mindedness, a little less variety of occupation. Clough's suggestion that Lowell's magnum opus should be an American "Canterbury Tales " was a shrewd one, but "Fitz Adam's Story," interesting as it is, is not conspicuous for narrative gift; and, in the long run, that a poet does n't do it is pretty fair working proof that he can't do it. So it is idle to prepare for Lowell an obituary in his own mock American style: "He wrote no epic, but if he had, etc., etc." His more ambitious poems were a source of spiritual stimulus and refreshment to thousands of his contemporaries, and if not many of them have eternalizing form, a few of them will last by sheer force and elevation of mood, and more will doubtless continue long to quicken the imagination of American youth in the schools, who can approach the whole body of Lowell's poetry in something of a freshly contemporary spirit. So by a devious road we come to the conclusion of the whole matter. If, by the gradual diffusion of Lowell's first poetic impulse, and its application in other affairs of a various life, it lost a little in pure immortalizing intensity, yet the "Commemoration Ode" and the "Biglow Papers" have a valid and perdurable claim to remembrance; and the place of the man himself as one of the poets-militant below is secure. And if, as Lowell wrote in one of his note-books, the poet's business is to make heroes as well as sing them, none has performed it better. CHAPTER VIII LOWELL'S PROSE 1. His Talk. LOWELL'S talk was never prosy. Leslie Stephen, who had every opportunity of knowing, has recorded that save perhaps on the subject of his astonishing faculty for the detection of Jews, Lowell could not possibly come within measurable distance of boring; and in the offices of his publishers there is still a tradition that he never called on the most casual business without leaving behind him something quotable that would be passed from mouth to mouth for days. Yet his talk was singularly of a piece with his letters and his essays. In a real and underogatory sense Lowell "talked prose." So, in dealing with his "spontaneous, enthusiastic, and versatile" expression,-to employ a convenient formula which, however it may fit American literature as a whole, is strikingly applicable to Lowell, - it will be of advantage to consider it when most spontaneous, most enthusiastic, most versatile, in short, in his familiar talk. |