nge in their high-hearted ways,
Beautiful evermore and with the rays
Of morn on their white Shields of Expectation."

From 1857 to 1862 Lowell edited the _Atlantic Monthly_, and from 1863
to 1872 the _North American Review_. His prose, beginning with an
early volume of _Conversations on Some of the Old Poets_, 1844, has
consisted mainly of critical essays on individual writers, such as
Dante, Chaucer, Spenser, Emerson, Shakespeare, Thoreau, Pope, Carlyle,
etc., together with papers of a more miscellaneous kind, like
_Witchcraft_, _New England Two Centuries Ago_, _My Garden
Acquaintance_, _A Good Word for Winter_, _Abraham Lincoln_, etc., etc.
Two volumes of these were published in 1870 and 1876, under the title
_Among My Books_, and another, _My Study Windows_, in 1871. As a
literary critic Lowell ranks easily among the first of living writers.
His scholarship is thorough, his judgment keen, and he pours out upon
his page an unwithholding wealth of knowledge, humor, wit, and
imagination from the fullness of an overflowing mind. His prose has
not the chastened correctness and "low tone" of Matthew Arnold's. It
is rich, exuberant, and, sometimes overfanciful, running away into
excesses of allusion or following the lead of a chance pun so as
sometimes to lay itself open to the charge of pedantry and bad taste.
Lowell's resources in the way of illustration and comparison are
endless, and the readiness of his wit and his delight in using it put
many temptations in his way. Purists in style accordingly take offense
at his saying that "Milton is the only man who ever got much poetry out
of a cataract, and that was a cataract in his eye," or of his speaking
of "a gentleman for whom the bottle before him reversed the wonder of
the stereoscope and substituted the Gascon _v_ for the _b_ in
binocular," which is certainly a puzzling and roundabout fashion of
telling us that he had drunk so much that he saw double. The critics
also find fault with his coining such words as "undisprivacied," and
with his writing such lines as the famous one--from _The Cathedral_,
1870--

"Spume-sliding down the baffled decuman."

It must be acknowledged that his style lacks the crowning grace of
simplicity, but it is precisely by reason of its allusive quality that
scholarly readers take pleasure in it. They like a diction that has
stuff in it and is woven thick, and where a thing is said in such a way
as to recall many other things.