ting vision. Nothing of his has any large design or effective
interdependent proportions. In a technical way an exception should be
noted in his skilful building of the ode--a form in which he was
extremely successful and for which he evidently had a native aptitude
... Lowell's constitutes, on the whole, the most admirable American
contribution to the nature poetry of English literature--far beyond
that of Bryant, Whittier, or Longfellow, I think, and only
occasionally excelled here and there by the magic touch of
Emerson."--_W. C. Brownell_, in _Scribner's Magazine_, _February,_
1907.

* * * * *

"Lowell is a poet who seems to represent New England more variously
than either of his comrades. We find in his work, as in theirs, her
loyalty and moral purpose. She has been at cost for his training, and
he in turn has read her heart, honoring her as a mother before the
world, and seeing beauty in her common garb and speech.... If Lowell
be not first of all an original genius, I know not where to look for
one. Judged by his personal bearing, who is brighter, more persuasive,
more equal to the occasion than himself,--less open to Doudan's
stricture upon writers who hoard and store up their thoughts for the
betterment of their printed works? Lowell's treasury can stand the
drafts of both speech and composition. Judged by his works, as a poet
in the end must be, he is one who might gain by revision and
compression. But think, as is his due, upon the high-water marks of
his abundant tide, and see how enviable the record of a poet who is
our most brilliant and learned critic, and who has given us our best
native idyll, our best and most complete work in dialectic verse, and
the noblest heroic ode that America has produced--each and all ranking
with the first of their kinds in English literature of the modern
time."--_Edmund Clarence Stedman_.

* * * * *

"As a racy humorist and a brilliant wit using verse as an instrument
of expression, he has no clear superior, probably no equal, so far at
least as American readers are concerned, among writers who have
employed the English language. As a satirist he has superiors, but
scarcely as an inventor of _jeux d'esprit_. As a patriotic lyrist he
has few equals and very few superiors in what is probably the highest
function of such a poet--that of stimulating to a noble height the
national instincts of his countrymen.... T