pointed Minister
to Spain. After three years he was transferred to the most important
post in our diplomatic service, London. He performed his duties with
extraordinary skill and success until 1885, when he was relieved. His
last years were spent in Elmwood, the Cambridge house where he was born,
and he was still writing, in almost as rich a vein as ever, when the end
came in 1891.

Here was certainly a full and varied life, responsive to many personal
moods and many tides of public feeling. Lowell drew intellectual
stimulus from enormously wide reading in classical and modern
literatures. Puritanically earnest by inheritance, he seems also to have
inherited a strain of levity which he could not always control, and,
through his mother's family, a dash of mysticism sometimes resembling
second sight. His physical and mental powers were not always in the
happiest mutual adjustment: he became easily the prey of moods and
fancies, and knew the alternations from wild gaiety of spirits to black
despair. The firm moral consistency of Puritanism was always his, yet
his playful remark about belonging in a hospital for incurable children
had a measure of truth in it also.

Both his poetry and his prose reveal a nature never quite integrated
into wholeness of structure, into harmony with itself. His writing,
at its best, is noble and delightful, full of human charm, but it is
difficult for him to master a certain waywardness and to sustain any
note steadily. This temperamental flaw does not affect the winsomeness
of his letters, unless to add to it. It is lost to view, often, in the
sincerity and pathos of his lyrics, but it is felt in most of his longer
efforts in prose, and accounts for a certain dissatisfaction which many
grateful and loyal readers nevertheless feel in his criticism. Lowell
was more richly endowed by nature and by breadth of reading than Matthew
Arnold, for instance, but in the actual performance of the critical
function he was surpassed in method by Arnold and perhaps in inerrant
perception, in a limited field, by Poe.

It was as a poet, however, that he first won his place in our
literature, and it is by means of certain passages in the "Biglow
Papers" and the "Commemoration Ode" that he has most moved his
countrymen. The effectiveness of The "Present Crisis" and "Sir Launfal,"
and of the "Memorial Odes," particularly the "Ode to Agassiz," is
likewise due to the passion, sweetness, and splendor of certain