Flood of Years,"
"The Little People of the Snow," and "Thanatopsis."

But now we come to the book which gave Mr. Lowell his strongest place
in American letters, and revealed his remarkable powers as a humorist,
satirist, and thinker. We have him in this work, at his very best. The
vein had never been thoroughly worked before. The Yankee of Haliburton
appeared ten years earlier than the creations of Lowell. But Sam Slick
was a totally different person from Hosea Biglow and Birdofredum
Sawin. Slick was a very interesting man, and he has his place in
fiction. His sayings and doings are still read, and his wise saws
continue to be pondered over. But the Biglow type seems to our mind,
more complete, more rounded, more perfect, more true, indeed, to
nature. The art is well proportioned all through, and the author
justifies Bungay's assumption, that he had attained the rank of
Butler, whose satire heads the list of all such productions. Butler,
however, Lowell really surpassed. The movement is swift, and there is
an individuality about the whole performance, which stamps it
undeniably as a masterpiece. The down-east dialect is managed with
consummate skill, the character-drawing is superlatively fine, and the
sentiments uttered, ringing like a bell, carry conviction. The
invasion of Mexico was a distasteful thing to many people because it
was felt that that war was dishonorable, and undertaken solely for the
benefit of the slaveholder, who was looking out for new premises,
where he might ply his calling, and continue the awful trade of
bondage, and his dealings in flesh and blood. Mr. Lowell's heart was
steeled against that expedition, and the first series of his Biglow
papers, introduced to the world by the Reverend Homer Wilbur, showed
how deeply earnest he was, and how terribly rigorous he could be, when
the scalpel had to be used. The first knowledge that the reading
world had of the curious, ingenuous, and quaint Hosea, was the
communication which his father, Ezekiel Biglow, sent to the Boston
_Courier_, covering a poem in the Yankee dialect, by the hand of the
young down-easter. It at once commanded notice. The idea was so new,
the homely truths were so well put, the language in print was so
unusual, and the "hits" were so well aimed, that the critics were
baffled. The public took hold immediately, and it soon spread that a
strong and bold pen was helping the reformers in their unpopular
struggle. The blows were struck