irresistible mirthfulness into the most hostile
countenances. Still Holmes apparently likes best the unrestrained
freedom of prose. His genius delights in periods finished after its own
heart,--pyramidal, trapezoidian, isoscelesian, rhomboidical. But
Lowell's genius is infinitely pliable, accommodating itself without
hesitation to the arbitrary requirements of the Sieur Spondee, and
laughing in the face of the halting Dactyl. His Birdofredom could, we
doubt not, sail majestically in the clouds of a stately hexameter, make
the aristocratic Alexandrine cry for quarter, and excel the old
Trouveurs in the _Rime equivoquee_. From the quiet esteem which his
early poems and essays had won for him, he leaped at once into the high
tide of popularity, and down its stream

'Went sailing with vast celerity,'

with the 'Biglow Papers' for his sail. This work electrified the public.
It pierced the crust of refinement and intelligence, and roused the
latent laughter of its heart. Even newsboys chuckled with delight over
its caustic hits at the powers that were, against which, with the
characteristic precocity of Young America, each had his private
individual spite; while they found in its peculiar phraseology a mine of
fun. Patriots rejoiced that one vigilant thinker dared stand guard over
our national honor, with the two-edged sword of satire in his hand. Men
in authority, at whom the shafts of its scathing rebukes were leveled,
writhed on their cushions of state, while, in sheer deference to his
originality and humor, they laughed with the crowd at--themselves. And
in sooth it was a goodly sight, the young scholar, who had hitherto only
dabbled delicately with the treasures of poetry, whose name was a very
synonym for elegance and the repose of a genial dignity, whom we
suspected of no keen outlooks into the practical world of to-day,--to
see this man suddenly flashing into the dusty arena, with indignation
rustling through his veins and breathing more flame

'Than ten fire-kings could swallow,'

scorching with his burning words, which an inimitable carelessness made
doubly effective, the willful absurdities of government and the palpable
wrongs of society, to question which had seemed before almost a heresy.
But Lowell's humor was the chrism, snatching together parallels whose
apparent inequalities, yet real justice, were powerfully convincing. He
never sought the inconsistencies of his subject, they flocked to meet
him uni