Though far and wide your winged words had flown,
Your daily presence kept you all our own,
Till with a sorrowing sigh, a thrill of pride,
We heard your summons, and you left our side
For larger duties and for tasks untried.
Atlantic Monthly.
We have been under the necessity of telling some unpleasant truths about American literature from time to time; and it is with hearty pleasure that we are now able to own that the Britishers have been, for the present, utterly and apparently hopelessly beaten by a Yankee in one important department of poetry. The tyranny of a vulgar public opinion and the charlatanism which is the price of political power, are butts for the shafts of the satirist which European poets may well envy Mr. Lowell.—North British Review.
Though eminent and able in many ways, Lowell remains absolutely a poet in feeling. His native genius was fostered by the associations of a singularly beautiful home; nourished by the works of the dramatists, by the ideal pictures of poets and novelists, by the tender solemnity of the discourses of his father, and of Channing and others of his father’s friends. Though he was not a rhyming prodigy like Pope, lisping in numbers, his first effusions as he came to manhood were in poetic form.—Frances H. Underwood.