S. O. BEETON, 248 STRAND, W. C.

(TEN DOORS FROM TEMPLE BAR)

PRINTED BY SPOTTISWOODE AND CO.

London, June 22,"

INTRODUCTION.

THOUGH enjoying a wide and well-earned reputation in America, it has often struck us as matter of regret that the name of James Russell Lowell, one of the truest-hearted poets on the other side of the Atlantic, should be comparatively so little known here. Indeed, we very much question if, till the publication of the Biglow Papers, he was ever accounted in England as anything better than a minor poet of America-a nation to the value of whose literary efforts, to the shame of our ignorance be it spoken, with two or three brilliant exceptions, John Bull has all along been superciliously disposed to attach little credit. In the belief that the English reading public has only to become acquainted with our author to love and admire him, as one whose soul goes with his work, who, like the olden painters, feels the religion of his art, and loves that art for art's sake, with a carefully cultured mind attuned to every human sympathy, and pure as a mountain lake the present publication has been undertaken.

In the truest sense of that much-abused term, Lowell is a poet. He has rich imagination, striking originality, much if irregularly displayed power, broad as well as delicate humour, sparkling, never ill-natured satire, touching pathos, strange rhythmical facility, and, better than all these, that strong kindly human

yearning after what is beautiful, right, and true, which teaches

him, in his own words

That mankind are one in spirit, and an instinct bears along
Round the earth's electric circle, the swift flash of right or wrong.

Born in 1819 at Cambridge, Massachusetts, he inherited from his father, the Rev. Charles Lowell, D.D., and from his grandfather, Judge John Lowell, founder of the 'Lowell Institute' at Boston, a revered name. He graduated at Harvard University in 1838, and in the following year 'broke ground' with a Class Poem of some promise. After studying law, which must have been to one of his temperament a very labour of Sisyphus, he was called to the Bar in 1840, and commenced practice in Boston. But 'the law is,' for the most part, 'a jealous mistress, and will brook no other;' and so thinking, perhaps, he speedily laid down his law books and devoted himself entirely to literature. In 1841 he published A Year's Life-a volume of poems which, we believe, has never in its entirety been reprinted, although many excerpts from it on mature revision have been woven into subsequent editions of his works. In the beginning of 1843, in conjunction with a literary friend, he commenced the publication of The Pioneer: A Literary and Critical Magazine—which failed, less from inanition than from the fact of its flying somewhat too far above the heads of ordinary readers to be a commercial success. Its chief contributors were Lowell, E. A. Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Neal, Story, &c. His next venture was a volume of poems, published in 1844, and comprising, besides his touching Legend of Brittany, his Prometheus, far less classical than poor P. B. Shelley's Prometheus Unbound, as both of necessity must be when compared with the Prometheus Bound of Eschylus, yet breathing the very spirit of love, fortitude, and faith in man's ultimate condition; Rhocus, based too on a classic model, with a heartwarm tenderness permeating it which is all his own; and smaller pieces, among