SOURCE: “‘The Only True Folk Songs We Have in English’: James Russell Lowell and the Politics of the Nation,” in Journal of American Folklore, Vol. 108, No. 428, Spring, 1995, pp. 131-55.

In the following essay, Bell studies Lowell's ballad lectures as they outline a Romantic perception of American nationalism.

I am going on with my work in an easy way. I can’t say that I care so much about it without J. R. L., who has done so much for me. He would have been so much pleased to have it all nicely finished up. He could talk the fine points in a ballad. They seem stale. I go back to the fine ones at times and sing them and cry over them like the old world.

—Francis James Child¹

Consider the puzzle offered by these words. Had James Russell Lowell lived to eulogize Francis James Child in this...