reluctant to acknowledge the manifest stateliness of this verse and the
evident grace of that, and the fine thought finely worded? Such
reluctance justifies itself. Nor would I attempt to back it by the cheap
sanctions of prophecy. Nay, it is quite possible that Lowell's poems may
live; I have no commands for futurity. Enough that he enriched the
present with the example of a scholarly, linguistic, verbal love of
literature, with a studiousness full of heart.

DOMUS ANGUSTA

The narrow house is a small human nature compelled to a large human
destiny, charged with a fate too great, a history too various, for its
slight capacities. Men have commonly complained of fate; but their
complaints have been of the smallness, not of the greatness, of the human
lot. A disproportion--all in favour of man--between man and his destiny
is one of the things to be taken for granted in literature: so frequent
and so easy is the utterance of the habitual lamentation as to the
trouble of a 'vain capacity,' so well explained has it ever been.

'Thou hast not half the power to do me harm
That I have to be hurt,'

discontented man seems to cry to Heaven, taking the words of the brave
Emilia. But inarticulate has been the voice within the narrow house.
Obviously it never had its poet. Little elocution is there, little
argument or definition, little explicitness. And yet for every vain
capacity we may assuredly count a thousand vain destinies, for every
liberal nature a thousand liberal fates. It is the trouble of the wide
house we hear of, clamorous of its disappointments and desires. The
narrow house has no echoes; yet its pathetic shortcoming might well move
pity. On that strait stage is acted a generous tragedy; to that
inadequate soul is intrusted an enormous sorrow; a tempest of movement
makes its home within that slender nature; and heroic happiness seeks
that timorous heart.

We may, indeed, in part know the narrow house by its
inarticulateness--not, certainly, its fewness of words, but its
inadequacy and imprecision of speech. For, doubtless, right language
enlarges the soul as no other power or influence may do. Who, for
instance, but trusts more nobly for knowing the full word of his
confidence? Who but loves more penetratingly for possessing the ultimate
syllable of his tenderness? There is a 'pledging of the word,' in
another sense than the ordinary sense of troth and promise. The poet
pledges h