he rest of his poetry may
fairly be said to gain on that of any of his American contemporaries
save Poe in more sensuous rhythm, in choicer diction, in a more
refined and subtilized imagination, and in a deeper, a more brooding
intelligence."--_Prof. William P. Trent_.

* * * * *

"In originality, in virility, in many-sidedness, Lowell is the first
of American poets. He not only possessed, at times in nearly equal
measure, many of the qualities most notable in his fellow-poets,
rivaling Bryant as a painter of nature, and Holmes in pathos, having
a touch too of Emerson's transcendentalism, and rising occasionally to
Whittier's moral fervor, but he brought to all this much beside. In
one vein he produced such a masterpiece of mingled pathos and nature
painting as we find in the tenth Biglow letter of the second series;
in another, such a lyric gem as _The Fountain_; in another, _The First
Snow-Fall_ and _After the Burial_; in another, again, the noble
_Harvard Commemoration Ode_.... He had plainly a most defective ear
for rhythm and verbal harmony. Except when he confines himself to
simple metres, we rarely find five consecutive lines which do _not_ in
some way jar on us. His blank verse and the irregular metres which he,
unfortunately, so often employs, have little or no music, and are
often quite intolerable. But after all the deductions which the most
exacting criticism can make, it still remains that, as a serious poet
Lowell stands high. As a painter of nature, he has, when at his best,
few superiors, and, in his own country, none. Whatever be their
esthetic and technical deficiencies, he has written many poems of
sentiment and pathos which can never fail to come home to all to whom
such poetry appeals. His hortatory and didactic poetry, as it
expresses itself in the _Commemoration Ode_, is worthy, if not of the
music and felicity of Milton and Wordsworth, at least of their tone,
when that tone is most exalted. As a humorist he is inimitable. His
humor is rooted in a fine sense of the becoming, and in a profounder
insight into the character of his countrymen than that of any other
American writer."--_John Churton Collins_.

* * * * *

"He was a brilliant wit and a delightful humorist; a discursive
essayist of unfailing charm; the best American critic of his time; a
scholar of wide learning, deep also when his interest was most
engaged; a powerful writ