The volume to which ‘Under the Willows’ gives its name is typical. He who prizes Lowell’s verse will hardly be content with any selection which does not include ‘Al Fresco,’ ‘A Winter-Evening Hymn to my Fire,’ ‘Invita Minerva,’ ‘The Dead House,’ ‘The Parting of the Ways,’ ‘The Fountain of Youth,’ and ‘The Nightingale in the Study.’
Its manner of contrasting To-Day with Yesterday, the genius that creates with the spirit that analyzes, makes The Cathedral an essentially American poem. The minster in its ‘vast repose,’
Silent and gray as forest-leaguered cliff,
must always seem a marvel to a dweller among temples of ‘deal and paint.’ The poem is the meditation of a New-World conservative, altogether catholic of sympathies, who holds no less firmly to the past because, under the fascination of democracy, he breathes in the presence of the ‘backwoods Charlemagne’ a braver air and is conscious of an ‘ampler manhood.’ And what, he asks, will be the faith of this new avatar of the Goth, what temples will the creature build? Very beautiful, very suggestive, and in its shifting moods entirely representative of the poet who wrote it must this fine work always seem.
The Ode recited at the Harvard Commemoration (July 21, 1865) is Lowell’s supreme achievement in verse. It breathes the most exalted patriotism, a love of native land that is intense, fiery, consuming. Though written in honor of sons of the University who had gone to the war, the spirit of the Ode is not local and particular. The poet celebrates not individual deeds alone but the sum of those deeds, not man but manhood:—
That leap of heart whereby a people rise
Up to a noble anger’s height,
And, flamed on by the Fates, not shrink, but grow more bright,
That swift validity in noble veins,
Of choosing danger and disdaining shame,