"The bluebird, shifting his light load of song
From post to post along the cheerless fence,"
and in June to lie under the willows and rejoice with
"The thin-winged swallow, skating on the air."
Another pronounced characteristic which he has in common with the New England group is nobility of ideals. His poem entitled For an Autograph, voices in one line the settled conviction of his life:—
"Not failure, but low aim, is crime."
He is America's greatest humorist in verse. The Biglow Papers and A
Fable for Critics are ample justification for such an estimate.
As Lowell grew older, his poetry, dominated too much by his acute intellect, became more and more abstract. In Under the Old Elm, for example, he speaks of Washington as:—
"The equestrian shape with unimpassioned brow
That paces silent on through vistas of acclaim."
It is possible to read fifty consecutive lines of his Commemoration Ode without finding any but abstract or general terms, which are rarely the warp and woof out of which the best poetry is spun. This criticism explains why repeated readings of some of his poems leave so little impression on the mind. Some of the poetry of his later life is, however, concrete and sensuous, as the following lines from his poem Agassiz (1874) show:—
"To lie in buttercups and clover-bloom,
Tenants in common with the bees,
And watch the white clouds drift through gulfs of trees,
Is better than long waiting in the tomb."