’And here I must say he wrote excellent articles
  On the Hebraic points, or the force of Greek particles,
  They filled up the space nothing else was prepared for;
  And nobody read that which nobody cared for;
  If any old book reached a fiftieth edition,
  He could fill forty pages with safe erudition;
  He could gauge the old books by the new set of rules,
  And his very old nothings pleased very old fools. 
  But give him a new book fresh out of the heart,
  And you put him at sea without compass or chart,—­
  His blunders aspired to the rank of an art;
  For his lore was engraft, something foreign that grew in him,
  Exhausting the sap of the native, and true in him,
  So that when a man came with a soul that was new in him,
  Carving new forms of truth out of Nature’s old granite,
  New and old at their birth, like Le Verrier’s planet,
  Which, to get a true judgment, themselves must create
  In the soul of their critic the measure and weight,
  Being rather themselves a fresh standard of grace,
  To compute their own judge and assign him his place,
  Our reviewer would crawl all about it and round it,
  And reporting each circumstance just as he found it,
  Without the least malice—­his record would be
  Profoundly aesthetic as that of a flea,
  Which, supping on Wordsworth, should print, for our sakes,
  Recollections of nights with the Bard of the Lakes,
  Or, borne by an Arab guide, venture to render a
  General view of the ruins of Denderah.’

He draws with a few strokes of his magical charcoal a sharp silhouette of Brownson upon the wall of our waiting curiosity, fills in his sketch of Parker with a whole wilderness of classical shades, disposes of Willis with a kiss and a blow, gives pages of sharp pleasantries to Emerson, pays a graceful tribute to Whittier, and Hawthorne,—­

  ’His strength is so tender, his wildness so meek,
  That a suitable parallel sets one to seek,—­
  He’s a John Bunyan Fouque, a Puritan Tieck;
  When Nature was shaping him, clay was not granted
  For making so full-sized a man as she wanted,
  So to fill out her model, a little she spared
  From some finer-grained stuff for a woman prepared,
  And she could not have hit a more excellent plan
  For making him fully and perfectly man.’

Turning backward from these evidences of Lowell’s ripening powers to his early poems, astonishment at his versatility is the first emotion produced.  It is hard to believe that the ‘Biglow Papers’ slid from under the hand that wrote the ‘Prometheus’ and the ‘Legend of Brittany.’  His genius flashes upon us like a certain flamboyant style of poetic architecture—­the flowing, flame-like curves of his humor blending happily with the Gothic cusps of veneration for the old, with quaint ivy-leaves, green and still rustling under the wind and rain, springing