long Abraham." The fact is that
Lowell, like most men of the "Brahmin caste," came slowly to a recognition
of Lincoln's true quality. Motley, watching events from Vienna, had a
better perspective than Boston then afforded. Even Mr. Norton, Lowell's
dear friend and associate upon the _North American Review_, thought in 1862
that the President was timid, vacillating, and secretive, and, what now
seems a queerer judgment still, that he wrote very poor English. But if the
editors of the _North American_ showed a typical Anglo-Saxon reluctance in
yielding to the spell of a new political leadership, Lowell made full
amends for it in that superb Lincoln strophe now inserted in the
"Commemoration Ode," afterthought though it was, and not read at the
celebration.

In this poem and in the various Centennial Odes composed ten years later,
Lowell found an instrument exactly suited to his temperament and his
technique. Loose in structure, copious in diction, swarming with imagery,
these Odes gave ample scope for Lowell's swift gush of patriotic fervor,
for the afflatus of the improviser, steadied by reverence for America's
historic past. To a generation beginning to lose its taste for
commemorative oratory, the Odes gave--and still give--the thrill of
patriotic eloquence which Everett and Webster had communicated in the
memorial epoch of 1826. The forms change, the function never dies.

The dozen years following the Civil War were also the period of Lowell's
greatest productiveness in prose. Tethered as he was to the duties of his
professorship, and growling humorously over them, he managed nevertheless
to put together volume after volume of essays that added greatly to his
reputation, both here and in England. For it should be remembered that the
honorary degrees of D.C.L. from Oxford and LL.D. from Cambridge were
bestowed upon Lowell in 1873 and 1874; long before any one had thought of
him as Minister to England, and only a little more than ten years after he
had printed his indignant lines about

"The old J. B.
A-crowdin' you and me."

J. B. seemed to like them! A part of Lowell's full harvest of prose sprang
from that habit of enormous reading which he had indulged since boyhood. He
liked to think of himself as "one of the last of the great readers"; and
though he was not that, of course, there was nevertheless something of the
seventeenth century tradition in his gluttony of books. The very sight and
touch and sme