eriousness that is the undercurrent of all his writing. A high
idealism characterizes all his work. One of his greatest services to
his country was the effort to create a saner and sounder political
life. As he himself realized, he often moralized his work too much
with a purposeful idealism. In middle life he said, "I shall never be
a poet until I get out of the pulpit, and New England was all
meeting-house when I was growing up." In religion and philosophy he
was conservative, deprecating the radical and scientific tendencies of
the age, with its knife and glass--

"That make thought physical and thrust far off
The Heaven, so neighborly with man of old,"

The moral impulse and the poetic impulse were often in conflict, and
much of his early poetry for this reason was condemned by his later
judgment. His maturer poems are filled with deep-thoughted lines,
phrases of high aspiration and soul-stirring ecstasies. Though his
thought is spiritual and ideal, it is always firmly rooted in the
experience of common humanity. All can climb the heights with him and
catch inspiring glimpses at least of the ideal and the infinite.

CRITICAL APPRECIATIONS

"The proportion of his poetry that can be so called is small. But a
great deal of it is very fine, very noble, and at times very
beautiful, and it discloses the distinctly poetic faculty of which
rhythmic and figurative is native expression. It is impressionable
rather than imaginative in the large sense; it is felicitous in detail
rather than in design; and of a general rather than individual, a
representative rather than original, inspiration. There is a field of
poetry, assuredly not the highest, but ample and admirable--in which
these qualities, more or less unsatisfactory in prose, are
legitimately and fruitfully exercised. All poetry is in the realm of
feeling, and thus less exclusively dependent on the thought that is
the sole reliance of prose. Being genuine poetry, Lowell's profits by
this advantage. Feeling is fitly, genuinely, its inspiration. Its
range and limitations correspond to the character of his
susceptibility, as those of his prose do to that of his thought. The
fusion of the two in the crucible of the imagination is infrequent
with him, because with him it is the fancy rather than the imagination
that is luxuriant and highly developed. For the architectonics of
poetry he had not the requisite reach and grasp, the comprehensive and
construc