of Harvard
University; he gave a course of lectures on the Old English Dramatists
before the Lowell Institute; he collected a volume of his poems; he
wrote and spoke on public affairs; and, the year before his death,
revised, rearranged, and carefully edited a definitive series of his
writings in ten volumes. He died at Elmwood, August 12, 1891. Since
his death three small volumes have been added to his collected
writings, and Mr. Norton has published _Letters of James Russell
Lowell_, in two volumes.

THE VISION OF SIR LAUNFAL

INTRODUCTORY NOTE

Lowell was in his thirtieth year when he wrote and published _The
Vision of Sir Launfal_. It appeared when he had just dashed off his
_Fable for Critics_, and when he was in the thick of the anti-slavery
fight, writing poetry and prose for _The Anti-Slavery Standard_, and
sending out his witty _Biglow Papers_. He had married four years
before, and was living in the homestead at Elmwood, walking in the
country about, and full of eagerness at the prospect which lay before
him. In a letter to his friend Charles F. Briggs, written in December,
1848, he says: "Last night ... I walked to Watertown over the snow,
with the new moon before me and a sky exactly like that in Page's
evening landscape. Orion was rising behind me, and, as I stood on the
hill just before you enter the village, the stillness of the fields
around me was delicious, broken only by the tinkle of a little brook
which runs too swiftly for Frost to catch it. My picture of the brook
in _Sir Launfal_ was drawn from it. But why do I send you this
description,--like the bones of a chicken I had picked? Simply because
I was so happy as I stood there, and felt so sure of doing something
that would justify my friends. But why do I not say that I have done
something? I believe that I have done better than the world knows yet;
but the past seems so little compared with the future.... I am the
first poet who has endeavored to express the American Idea, and I
shall be popular by and by."

It is not very likely that Lowell was thinking of _Sir Launfal_ when
he wrote this last sentence, yet it is not straining language too far
to say that when he took up an Arthurian story he had a different
attitude toward the whole cycle of legends from that of Tennyson, who
had lately been reviving the legends for the pleasure of
English-reading people. The exuberance of the poet as he carols of
June in the prelude to Part Firs