which a vision was let down to me from Heaven, shall be the wrappage to a bar of soap, or the platter for a beggar's broken victuals."

But here is a bit of the genuine, unadulterated Lowell, in one of his rare bursts of terrible scorn and irony. It is indeed a tremendous indictment on the war material of an "Unthrifty Mother State," this picture of a war recruit. "An own child of the Almighty God! I remember him as he was brought to be christened—a ruddy, rugged babe; and now there he wallows, reeking, seething-the dead corpse, not of a man, but of a soul—a putrefying lump, horrible for the life that is in it. Comes the wind of heaven, that good Samaritan, and parts the hair upon his forehead, nor is too nice to kiss those parched, cracked lips; the morning opens upon him her eyes full of pitying sunshine, the sky yearns down to him,-and there he lies fermenting. O sleep! let me not profane thy holy name by calling that stertorous unconsciousness a slumber! By-and-by comes along the State, God's vicar. Does she say, 'My poor, forlorn foster-child! Behold here a force which I will make dig and plant and build for me'? Not so; but, 'Here is a recruit ready-made to my hand, a piece of destroying energy lying unprofitably idle.' So she claps an ugly gray suit on him, puts a musket in his grasp, and sends him off, with Gubernatorial and other godspeeds, to do duty as a destroyer."

Mr. Lowell is hard upon fine writers; and, indeed, his own style, although rising to an occasion, never approaches the chronic elevation of the penny dreadful; he prefers "was hanged" to "was launched into eternity;" he would have the poor taste to write "when the halter was put round his neck," rather than "when the fatal noose was adjusted about the neck of the unfortunate victim of his own unbridled passions ;" he will not even call a “great fire” a "disastrous conflagration," or speak of "a frightened horse" as an “infuriated animal." Instead of rising at a public dinner with “I shall, with your permission, beg leave to offer some brief observations," Mr. Lowell might be so negligent of oratory as to begin, "I shall say a few words." But he never talks the current nonsense about good Saxon English, and he boldly maintains that our language has gained immensely by the infusion (of Latinisms), in richness of synonym, and in power of expressing nice shades of thought and feeling." Perhaps there may be a question between the English "again rising" and the Latin "resurrection;" but "conscience" is superior to "in-wit," "remorse to "again-bite ;" and what home-bred Englishman could ape the high-Roman fashion of such togated words as "the multitudinous sea incarnadine"? Again, "mariner" is felt to be poetically better than "sailor" for emotional

purposes, and most people would prefer to say, mariner" rather than "It was an elderly seaman.'

"It was an ancient

Such shrewd perceptions abound in these Essays: and now, before proceeding, I might, with that kind of careless facility so much in vogue with the critics, point out a few slips or a little slovenliness here and there, as when Mr. Lowell opines that "Chastelard" was ever popular in England, or that Mr. Swinburne really owes very much to Robert Browning, and quite forgets to mention D. G. Rossetti, who was his real master. We might remark upon his curious notion that Clough was, after all, the great poet of the age, and wonder why, in dealing with Pope's artificiality, he should have failed to allude to that one most perfect and extreme case, "The Dying Christian to his Soul;" or, whilst condemning his want of real pathos, should have forgotten such real bursts of passion as occur in "Eloisa to Abelard." As to Mr. Lowell's slovenly style, nothing can be more slipshod than the following on Dryden: "He is always imitating-no, that is not the word," &c.; or "The always hasty Dryden, as I think I have said before," &c. Every critical notice is expected to contain a few specimens of such flippant signs of the critic's superior acumen, and I hope I shall get credit for them; but the real object of such an article as this is "to give the quality of a man's mind, and the amount of his literary performance." To such business we now continue to apply ourselves.

In Mr. Lowell's mind, the Conservative and Radical elements are mixed in truly statesmanlike proportions. Capable of that concen trated passion which did much towards sweeping slavery from his own land, and with a certain bitterness and scepticism towards established forms of religion, no one can fail to be reassured and won by the essential sobriety of his qualifying utterances. Do you think him a Radical? then note how he dwells on that "power of the Past over the minds and conduct of men, which alone insures the continuity of national growth, and is the great safeguard of power and progress;" or again, "The older Government is the better, and suits; new ones hunt folks' corns out like new boots." His impatience with the sects is with their forms only, and their attempts to imprison the Eagle of Faith in the iron cage of Dogma. He quotes with approval Selden, who says, "It is a vain thing to talk of an heretick—a man, for his heart, cannot think any otherwise than he does think;" and we can hardly be grateful enough to him for reminding the children of this generation that "So soon as an early conviction has cooled into a phrase, its work is over, and the best that can be done with it is to bury it."

But there is one clear note running through the whole of his utterances which makes them fresh as with the sea air. It is the note of moral supremacy; "that moral supremacy is the only one that leaves monuments and not ruins behind it "-that "great motors of the race are moral, not intellectual, and their force lies ready to the use of the poorest and the weakest of us all;" that "no man without intense faith in something can ever be in earnest ;" that in act a right ambition is to be "a man amongst men, not a humbug amongst humbugs," and in word "to give the true coin of speech, never the highly ornamental promise to pay-token of insolvency."

It is not safe to divide Mr. Lowell's Essays into the heavy and the light, for there come to him flashes of delicate humour in his gravest moods, and he will anon stop and moralise, like Thackeray, in front of a clown. Safer is it to separate the volumes roughly into contemporary and non-contemporary. "Among my Books," 2 vols., are entirely non-contemporary, and full of grave and weighty matter concerning "New England Two Centuries Ago," Dryden, Shakespeare, Lessing, Rousseau, Dante, Spenser, Wordsworth, Milton, and Keats; whilst "My Study Windows," with the exception of "Pope," "Chaucer," and "Notes on the Library of Old Authors," deal entirely with contemporary matters. Such are "My Garden Acquaintance," "A Good Word for Winter," "On a certain Condescension in Foreigners," "A Great Public Character," whose interest for us begins and ends with this sketch of him,-a remark which applies equally, if not more, to "The Life and Letters of James Gates Percival;" and finally we have an extremely interesting and entertaining section of critical and biographical studies on Carlyle, Abraham Lincoln, Emerson, Thoreau: and to this list we must add a notice of Edgar Poe's life and works, written at his own request in 1845, and attached to an edition of Poe's works in 4 vols.

No true American can touch upon the early settlement of the Pilgrim Fathers upon the barren coast of Massachusetts, and the momentous national life which grew out of it, without an irrepressible glow of feeling. It is like the sentiments of the Swiss about William Tell. Mr. Lowell's "New England Two Centuries Ago" is a prose idyll full of suppressed poetical fervour. He calls the history "dry and unpicturesque." "There is no rustle of silks, no waving of plumes, no chink of golden spurs," but we soon feel that "the homespun fates of Cephas and Prudence" have the living interest of life in the catacombs about them, and are "intrinsically poetic and noble." "The noise of the axe, hammer, and saw" rings through it all, and is the physical image of that mighty impulse which drove

the Puritan to make "the law of man a living counterpart of the law of God."

This coming out into the wilderness for the sake of an idea is full of a moral chivalry irresistibly attractive to an age bird-limed with the "expedient," and suffocated with the "practical; " it is just the indescribable magnet which draws the imagination of sceptical France after a Victor Hugo, or the dolce far niente of Italy after a Garibaldi. Sublime singleness of purpose-divine simplicity of heart-the little child is again set in the midst of us by the dear Lord, and presently he overcomes the mailed Goliath with a sling and a stone ! "Dry and unpoetic," repeats Lowell, with his great heart all on fire; "everything is near, authentic, petty," "no mist of distance to soften outlines, no image of tradition," only this-that Jehovah, who had become "I was," became again "I am to the Puritans.. Yet, were they not fanatics?-enthusiasts they were; but work and "business" saved the balance of character: their very narrowness and despotism were sensible and judicious. "They knew that liberty in the hands of feeble-minded men, when no thorough mental training has developed the understanding and given the judgment its needful means of comparison and correction," meant nothing more than "the supremacy of their particular form of imbecility, a Bedlam chaos of monomaniacs and bores." The New Englander was without humour, but that quality has since been largely developed in his descendants, who fail not to see that Puritanism had an intensely humorous side. Mr. Lowell, in the midst of his close sobriety of treatment, has a winning perception of those lighter shades of the comic which crop up in such a "Miles Gloriosus" as Captain Underhill, who took up certain heretical opinions "with all the ardour of personal interest" "on the efficiency of grace without reference to works." His chief accuser, although he denied the charge of heresy on that score, was "a sober woman whom he had seduced in the ship and drawn to his opinion, but who was afterwards better informed." He told her that he had continued "in a legal way and under a spirit of bondage," and could get no "assurance," for about five years, till at length, "as he was taking a pipe of the good creature tobacco, the Spirit fell upon his heart, an absolute promise of free grace, which he had never doubted, whatsoever sin he should fall into." "A good preparative," adds the chronicler, "for such motions as he familiarly used to make to some of that sex. The next day he was called again and banished, &c." His subsequent grave complaints-claims for promotion in the colony, and profound consciousness of personal merit-are very

diverting, especially at the end, where he throws in a neat touch of piety: "and if the honoured court shall vouchsafe to make some addition, that which hath not been deserved by the same power of God may be in due season."

Here and there a fugitive trace of that simple old life of the early colonists still survives, and with it we must take farewell of them. The picture is caught and crayoned with the quick and tender touch of a poet's pencil :

"Passing through Massachusetts, perhaps at a distance from any house, it may be in the midst of a piece of wood and where four roads meet, one may sometimes even yet see a small, square, onestory building, whose use would not long be doubtful. It is summer, and the flickering shadows of forest leaves dapple the roof of the little porch, whose door stands wide, and shows, hanging on either hand, rows of straw hats and bonnets that look as if they had done good service. As you pass the open window, you hear whole platoons of high-pitched voices discharging words of two or three syllables, with wonderful precision and unanimity.

They are The great dis

Now, this little building and others like it were an original kind of fortification, invented by the founders of New England. the Martello towers that protect our coast. covery of the Puritan fathers was that knowledge was not an alms or pittance . . . but a sacred debt which the commonwealth owed to every one of her children."

Passing from the New England of America to the old England of Shakespeare, we have to note Shakespeare's good fortune in living at a time when old England was passing into the new England of modern Europe; and the reflection, although not new, is well put by Mr. Lowell when he notes that, had Shakespeare been born fifty years earlier, he would have been damped by a book language not flexible, not popular, not rich, not subdued by practice to definite accentuation; or fifty years later he would have missed the Normanly refined and Saxonly sagacious England of Elizabeth, and found an England absorbed and angry with the solution of political and religious problems. Mr. Lowell, like every other thoughtful writer, must have his say on the distinction between genius and originality-and he says it pithily and well-" Talent sticks fast to the earth. Genius claims kindred with the very workings of nature, so that a sunset shall seem like a quotation from Dante or Milton; and if Shakespeare be read in the very presence of the sea itself, his verse shall but seem nobler for the sublime criticism of ocean." And how prettily said is this: "What is the reason that all children are geniuses (though they