of the characters of Hawthorne and Holmes and Whittier. Consider, for example, the cleverness of the portrait of Poe, and note that the criticism is really just, in spite of the crackling of epigram:
There comes Poe, with his raven, like Barnaby Rudge,
Three fifths of him genius and two fifths sheer fudge,
Who talks like a book of iambs and pentameters,
In a way to make people of common sense damn metres,
Who has written some things quite the best of their kind,
But the heart somehow seems all squeezed out by the mind, …
And the sketch of Bryant, with all the ingenuity of its punning and all the artificiality of its rhyming, is not a caricature, but a true portrait:
There is Bryant, as quiet, as cool, and as dignified,
As a smooth, silent iceberg, that never is ignified,
Save when by reflection 'tis kindled o' nights
With a semblance of flame by the chill Northern Lights.
He may rank (Griswold says so) first bard of your nation
(There's no doubt that he stands in supreme ice-olation),
Your topmost Parnassus he may set his heel on,
But no warm applauses come, peal following peal on,—
He's too smooth and too polished to hang any zeal on:
Unqualified merits, I'll grant, if you choose, he has 'em,
But he lacks the one merit of kindling enthusiasm;
If he stir you at all, it is just, on my soul,
Like being stirred up with the very North Pole.
He is very nice reading in summer, but inter
Nos, we don't want extra freezing in winter;
Take him up in the depth of July, my advice is,
When you feel an Egyptian devotion to ices.
But, deduct all you can, there's enough that's right good in him,
He has a true soul for field, river, and wood in him;
And his heart, in the midst of brick walls, or where'er it is,
Glows, softens, and thrills with the tenderest charities.
Although he was dealing solely with the literature of his own country, Lowell has ever a cosmopolitan point of view, while still keeping his feet firm on his native soil. He was never either provincial in self-assertion or colonial in self-abasement. No one had higher ideals for America; and no one was prompter to see the absurdity of hasty assertions that these ideals had already been attained. He refused absolutely to see a Swan of Avon in any of our wild geese. He laughed to scorn the suggestion that we ought to have great poets of our own merely because of the vastness of the country. He had a healthy detestation of that confession of inferiority which consists in calling Irving the "American Goldsmith," and Cooper the "American Scott." It was this youthful foible—feebler now than it was when the "Fable" was written, but not yet quite dead—that Lowell girded against in one of his most brilliant passages:
By the way, 'tis a fact that displays what profusions
Of all kinds of greatness bless free institutions,
That while the Old World has produced barely eight
Of such poets as all men agree to call great,
And of other great characters hardly a score
(One might safely say less than that rather than more),
With you every year a whole crop is begotten,
They're as much of a staple as corn is, or cotton;
Why, there's scarcely a huddle of log huts and shanties
That has not brought forth its own Miltons and Dantes;
I myself know ten Byrons, one Coleridge, three Shelleys,
Two Raphaels, six Titians, (I think) one Apelles,
Leonardos and Rubenses plenty as lichens,
One (but that one is plenty) American Dickens,
A whole flock of Lambs, any number of Tennysons,—
In short, if a man has the luck to have any sons,
He may feel pretty certain that one out of twain
Will be some very great person over again.
This same foible we find animad-
