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 of the sense whereby he perceives a choice rhyme
in the Anglo-Norman of Marie de France or a clang of arms in the brief
verse of Peire de Bergerac, or touches sensitively a word whereby Dante
has transcended something sweet in Bernard de Ventadour, or Virgil
somewhat noble in Homer. In his own use, and within his own English, he
has the abstinence and the freshness of intention that keep every word
new for the day's work. He gave to the language, and did not take from
it; it gained by him, and lost not. There are writers of English now at
work who almost convince us of their greatness until we convict them on
that charge: they have succeeded at an unpardonable cost; they are
glorified, but they have beggared the phrases they leave behind them.

Nevertheless Lowell was no poet. To accept his verse as a poet's would
be to confess a lack of instinct, and there is no more grievous lack in a
lover of poetry. Reason, we grant, makes for the full acceptance of his
poems, and perhaps so judicial a mind as his may be forgiven for having
trusted to reason and to criticism. His trust was justified--if such
justification avails--by the admiration of fairly educated people who
apparently hold him to have been a poet first, a humourist in the second
place, and an essayist incidentally. It is hard to believe that he
failed in instinct about himself. More probably he was content to forego
it when he found the ode, the lyric, and the narrative verse all so
willing. They made no difficulty, and he made none; why then are we