own judge and assign him his place,
Our reviewer would crawl all about it and round it,
And reporting each circumstance just as he found it,
Without the least malice--his record would be
Profoundly aesthetic as that of a flea,
Which, supping on Wordsworth, should print, for our sakes,
Recollections of nights with the Bard of the Lakes,
Or, borne by an Arab guide, venture to render a
General view of the ruins of Denderah.'

He draws with a few strokes of his magical charcoal a sharp silhouette
of Brownson upon the wall of our waiting curiosity, fills in his sketch
of Parker with a whole wilderness of classical shades, disposes of
Willis with a kiss and a blow, gives pages of sharp pleasantries to
Emerson, pays a graceful tribute to Whittier, and Hawthorne,--

'His strength is so tender, his wildness so meek,
That a suitable parallel sets one to seek,--
He's a John Bunyan Fouque, a Puritan Tieck;
When Nature was shaping him, clay was not granted
For making so full-sized a man as she wanted,
So to fill out her model, a little she spared
From some finer-grained stuff for a woman prepared,
And she could not have hit a more excellent plan
For making him fully and perfectly man.'

Turning backward from these evidences of Lowell's ripening powers to his
early poems, astonishment at his versatility is the first emotion
produced. It is hard to believe that the 'Biglow Papers' slid from under
the hand that wrote the 'Prometheus' and the 'Legend of Brittany.' His
genius flashes upon us like a certain flamboyant style of poetic
architecture--the flowing, flame-like curves of his humor blending
happily with the Gothic cusps of veneration for the old, with quaint
ivy-leaves, green and still rustling under the wind and rain, springing
easily out of its severer lines. What resistless magic is there in the
fingers whose touch upon the same rich banks of keys, summons solemn,
vibrant peals as of Beethoven's grandest fugues, endless harmonies as of
the deep seas, and the light and graceful fantasies of Rossini, which
are as the glad sunshine upon their waves. Truly the poet's gift is a
divine and an awful one. His heart must needs be proud and humble too,
who is claimed as nearer of kin than a brother by myriads of stranger
souls, each, perhaps, owning its separate creed, and in whose unspoken
prayers his name is ever present. In his 'Conversations on some of the
old Poets,' we discover the alembic t