nvited. And his infinite cheerfulness, his freedom, even in his
most daring onslaughts, from ill-nature, these were the influences meet,

'That bowed our hearts like barley bending.'

Scarcely did we know our knight in his new armor. Off with the hauberk
and visor, down with the glittering shield of his mediaeval crusade, and,
lo! with his hand on the plow and his eyes on the fair fields of his own
New England, our country boy sings his _Ave Aquila!_ while other men are
rubbing the sunbeams of of the new-born day into their sleepy eyes.

And it was not alone in our own country that this newly developed phase
of our poet's genius was acknowledged and applauded. Says a British
Review, with an admiration whose reservations are unfortunately too just
to be disputed: 'All at once we have a batch of small satirists,--Mr.
Bailey at their head,--in England, and one really powerful satirist in
America, namely, Mr. J.R. Lowell, whose "Biglow Papers" we most gladly
welcome as being not only the best volume of satires since the
Anti-Jacobin, but also the first work of real and efficient poetical
genius which has reached us from the United States. We have been under
the necessity of telling some unpleasant truths about American
literature from time to time, and it is with hearty pleasure that we are
now able to own that the Britishers have been for the present utterly
and apparently hopelessly beaten by a Yankee in one important department
of poetry. In the United States, social and political evils have a
breadth and tangibility which are not at present to be found in the
condition of any other civilized country. The "peculiar domestic
institution," the fillibustering tendencies of the nation, the
charlatanism which is the price of political power, are butts for the
shafts of the satirist, which European poets may well envy Mr. Lowell.
We do not pretend to affirm that the evils of European society may not
be as great in their own way as those which affect the credit of the
United States, with the exception, of course, of slavery, which makes
American freedom deservedly the laughing-stock of the world; but what we
do say is, that the evils in point have a boldness and simplicity which
our more sophisticated follies have not, and that a hundred years hence
Mr. Lowell's Yankee satires will be perfectly intelligible to every
one.'

The predictions of the English reviewer are fulfilled already. The
prescribed century has not elapsed