we know not what bounding ambitions which they have never succeeded in definitely describing in words.  Mr. Lowell was a refutation of the fallacy that an American can never be American enough.  He ranked with the students and the critics among all nations, and nothing marks his transatlantic conditions except, perhaps, that his scholarliness is a little anxious and would not seem so; he enriches his phrases busily, and yet would seem composed; he makes his allusions tread closely one upon another, and there is an assumed carelessness, and an ill-concealed vigilance, as to the effect their number and their erudition will produce upon the reader.  The American sensitiveness takes with him that pleasantest of forms; his style confesses more than he thinks of the loveable weakness of national vanity, and asks of the stranger now and again, ’Well, what do you think of my country?’

Declining, as I do, to separate style in expression from style in the thought that informs it—­for they who make such a separation can hardly know that style should be in the very conception of a phrase, in its antenatal history, else the word is neither choice nor authentic—­I recognise in Mr. Lowell, as a prose author, a sense of proportion and a delicacy of selection not surpassed in the critical work of this critical century.  Those small volumes, Among My Books and My Study Windows, are all pure literature.  A fault in criticism is the rarest thing in them.  I call none to mind except the strange judgment on Dr. Johnson:  ’Our present concern with the Saxons is chiefly a literary one. . .  Take Dr. Johnson as an instance.  The Saxon, as it appears to me, has never shown any capacity for art,’ and so forth.  One wonders how Lowell read the passage on Iona, and the letter to Lord Chesterfield, and the Preface to the Dictionary without conviction of the great English writer’s supreme art—­art that declares itself and would not be hidden.  But take the essay on Pope, that on Chaucer, and that on one Percival, a writer of American verse of whom English readers are not aware, and they prove Lowell to have been as clear in judging as he was exquisite in sentencing.  His essay ‘On a Certain Condescension in Foreigners’ is famous, but an equal fame is due to ‘My Garden Acquaintance’ and ’A Good Word for Winter.’  His talk about the weather is so full of wit that one wonders how prattlers at a loss for a topic dare attempt one so rich.  The birds that nest in his syringas seem to be not his pensioners only, but his parishioners, so charmingly local, so intent upon his chronicle does he become when he is minded to play White of Selborne with a smile.  And all the while it is the word that he is intent upon.  You may trace his reading by some fine word that has not escaped him, but has been garnered for use when his fan has been quick to purge away the chaff of commonplace.  He is thus fastidious and alert in many languages.  You wonder at the delicacy