he had outlined the function of the poet; and the whole set of his nature in the months between his engagement and his marriage was in the direction of poetic earnestness. His conception was dominated by moral enthusiasm: the preacher in him was always thrusting himself to the front, and the reformer of the day sometimes masqueraded in his verse in very antique forms. But his genuine love of art above all his unfailing apprehension of poetry as an end in itself saved him from a merely utilitarian notion of his high calling. And it is safe to say that he never was so happy as when he was abandoning himself to the full enjoyment of poetic composition. He diverted the streams of love and of anti-slavery fervor into this full current, and could say of his “Prometheus” that it was “overrunning with true radicalism and anti-slavery;” but the exhilaration which fanned his wings was the consciousness of youth and love finding an outlet in the natural voice of poetry. “I was never so happy as now,” he writes to Loring, 15 June, after telling of his “Prometheus” and “A Legend of Brittany,” on which he was at work. “I see Maria every other day. I am embowered in leaves, have a voluntary orchestra of birds and bees and frogs, and a little family of chickens to whom I have a sort of feeling of paternity, and begin to believe I had some share in begetting them.”

Page painted Lowell’s portrait when he was in New York and exhibited it in the spring. This picture is at once a likeness of the poet and an expression of the painter. Page was an idealist who found a most congenial subject in Lowell. Out of the dark canvass—for the painter, pursuing the elusive phantom of a recovery of the art of the Venetians, succeeded at any rate in giving to his work an ancient air—there looks forth a face which is the very apparition of poetry. Far removed from the sentimental aspect, it has depth of feeling, a serene assurance, and a Shakespearean ideality. It is not difficult to see that Page was not painting in Lowell a young Cambridge author, but the student of the English dramatists and the inheritor of all the ages of poetry. To his own neighbors and friends Lowell had much of this air in his presence. His flowing chestnut hair falling in rich masses from an equally dividing line, his unshorn face, his eyes with their kindly wistful look, his tremulous mouth,—all served to separate him in appearance from common men and to mark him as an unusual person.

How affectionately Lowell regarded Page and what admiration he had for his genius may be read in the dedication to him which was prefixed to his “Poems” issued in 1843 and retained in later collections. The frankness with which he avows his love for his friend is a witness to that openness of Lowell’s nature which we have already noticed, and the terms in which he speaks of Page’s art and of the artistic faith which they held in common give a hint of the basis of their comradery. Lowell disclaimed any special knowledge of painting, and always brought to bear, in his discussions on art, the principles which he had learned through his devotion to the art of poetry. In the relation of the two men to each other one is half tempted to recall the friendship of Keats and Haydon. In each case the poet believed in the painter less by reason of the work done than because of the ideals

held and aimed at. Page was an enthusiast, and a man of mingled imaginative and speculative powers. As Haydon preached the Elgin marbles to Keats, so Page discoursed on the old masters to Lowell. But the reciprocal admiration of Lowell and Page was really for the man behind the art. “I am glad you like my poems,” Lowell wrote to Mrs. Shaw; “Page is wiser than you and likes them because he knows I am better than they;” and to Mr. Briggs he had written shortly before: “You are a great deal better than anything you write, and Page than anything he paints, and I always think of you without your pen, and of him without his brushes.”

The admiration and affection with which Page and Briggs regarded Lowell were only more intimate than the feelings which were generally aroused. He had come to be looked on as a new poet. So Hawthorne, in his “Hall of Fantasy,” as first published, characterized him as “the poet of the generation that now enters upon the stage.” When the Pioneer was started Lowell’s was a name to conjure with. “The principal editor,” says the Tribune, “is well and widely known as one of the most gifted and promising poets in America;” and a Philadelphia paper speaks of the journal as “edited by a man whose genius and originality is at once the praise and wonder of his countrymen.” To be sure, newspaper praise is apt to be pitched in a high key, and the army of independent admirers on closer examination turns out to be a company of the author’s enthusiastic friends marching and countermarching across the stage, disappearing in one wing only to come out from another. But after all allowance has been made, it is clear that in a community which was eagerly expecting great things in literature, Lowell, though he had published little and much of that anonymously, was already one of the candidates for fame. He himself did not need this incentive. He had the consciousness of power and that audience of one which stimulated him to the exercise of his power.

“A Year’s Life” had been frankly autobiographic. The poems written afterward and now collected in the 1843 volume were the distinct outgrowth of a nature stimulated by this new experience of love and at last both fully alive to the consciousness of poetic feeling and eager with a desire to act out the aspirations which had been blown into flame by the breath of love. Hence the volume, in its contents, is of varied character, as the poet himself held within his restless life the somewhat contradictory elements which go to make up a poet and a reformer. “A Legend of Brittany,” which is the substantial piece, and stands at the front, is a piece of pure romance, pretty evidently sprung from the soil in which grew Keats’s “Isabella; or the Pot of Basil.” The underlying theme is not dissimilar, the measure is the same, and there is something of the same richness of color and delight in the beauty of single, even unfamiliar words. Yet the reader feels that Keats not only had the more vivid imagination, but a clearer sense of the beauty that lies in intensity of expression—an intensity so great that one almost holds one’s breath as he reads. Lowell, as we know, rarely essayed anything in the nature of story-telling; the dramatic faculty was not his, and keen as was his appreciation of the power of the elder dramatists, his criticism shows that he dwelt most emphatically on those passages and lines which disclose poetic beauty, rather than the features of construction. But Keats’s warmth and richness of decorative painting appealed to him with peculiar force at a time when he himself had come out into the sunshine and was intoxicated with his own happiness. It is clear that when he was writing “A Legend of Brittany” he was revelling in the possession of poetic fancy, and drawing himself to the height of his enjoyment of pure poetry unmixed with elements of didacticism. He wrote to G. B. Loring, 15 June, 1843, “I am now at work on a still longer poem [than “Prometheus”] in the ottava rima to be the first in my forthcoming volume. I feel more and more assured every day that I shall yet do something that will keep my name (and perhaps my body) alive. My wings were never so light and strong as now. So hurrah for a niche and a laurel.” The poem did not apparently call out any strong response, nor has it, I suspect, ever been read with very great admiration—certainly it cannot for a moment be compared in popularity with “The Vision of Sir Launfal,” which followed five years later, and the explanation is perhaps to be found mainly in its derivative character, even though readers might not be acutely aware how far it owed its origin to Keats.

Mr. Briggs, who was the stanchest of Lowell’s literary friends at this time, wrote with enthusiasm of the volume, using terms of admiration which must have been grateful indeed, since they were charged with discrimination and just appreciation; but he was frank and honest in his friendly judgment, and he wrote to Lowell of “A Legend of Brittany:” “It is too warm, rich, and full of sweet sounds and sights; the incense overpowers me, and the love and crime, and prayers and monks and glimpses of spirits oppress me. I am too much a clod of earth to mingle well in such elements. I feel while reading it as though I were lying upon a bed of down with a canopy of rose-colored silk above me, with gleams of sunshine darting in the room and half revealing and at times more than revealing strange figures painted upon the walls of my chamber. But I do not wonder that M. W. should like it. It is the proper reading for pure-minded loving creatures, from whose eyes knowledge with its hard besom has not yet swept away the golden cobwebs of fancy. I like her the better myself for liking it.”[38]

This long poem is not the only one in the book which springs from pure delight in poetic imagination; but it is by far the most full and unalloyed expression of this pleasure. When one reads, however, such a poem as “Rhœcus,” with its preface apologizing for so much paganism, and its application, and especially when one reads “Prometheus,” one is aware how largely Lowell was dominated, even in this time when his soul was flushed with the sense of beauty and awake to the tendrils it was putting forth, by a strong purpose to read the lesson of beauty and love to his fellows. The seriousness of life was indeed charged with an exalted meaning by the revelation which came to him when he was admitted into the intimate companionship of a woman who had in her something of the spirit of a prophetess, but it would be untrue to say that Maria White handed him the torch; she kindled to a greater brilliancy that which he already held, and his love transmuted the vague stirrings of his own nature into more definite purpose. Keats, to refer again to one with whom Lowell certainly had spiritual kinship, was mildly affected somewhat in the same way by the friendship which he formed in his impressionable years with Hunt and his circle, and if we could imagine Fanny Brawne a Mary Wollstonecraft, we might speculate on the effect she would have had on his poetry. Even Keats, with his passionate devotion to beauty, could dig a subterranean passage under the opening of the third book of “Endymion” for the purpose of blowing up the “present ministers;” and Lowell, taking the world-worn myth of Prometheus, could write into it reflections apposite to what he regarded as a tremendous upheaving force just ready to manifest itself in society. The poem of “Prometheus,” however, justly stands high in the estimation of Lowell’s readers, for the thought involved in it rises above the level of a didactic utterance, and carries with it an impersonation of human dignity which saves it from the reproach of making the myth a mere text for a modern discourse. The poem is the most comprehensive and largest expression of the mind of the poet at this period of emancipation, and the fine images with which it abounds spring from the subject itself and are not mere decorations.

Here, again, a comparison of “Prometheus” with Keats’s “Hyperion” illustrates the infusion of moral ardor which separates the disciple from the master. Keats summed up his poetic philosophy in the lines—

and he was fain to see the operation of Nature’s law by which one race of conquerors would dispossess another.

Lowell, speculating on the eternal struggle, figured in “Prometheus,” of right and wrong, of darkness and light, bids Jove heed that he—

and sees in a vision—

Mr. Briggs, writing to him on the appearance of the poem in the Democratic Review, reminds him that he had read a bit of it when visiting him in his house at Staten Island, and adds: “But I did not anticipate that you could or would lengthen out those few lines into a poem so full of majesty and sweetness. So far as my observation will allow me to judge, it is the best sustained effort of the American Muse. The structure of the verse is exceedingly fine to my ear, although it may not be as acceptable to the public ear as the almost emasculate smoothness of Bryant, to which it has been accustomed. The bold bright images with which ‘Prometheus’ abounds would be sufficient of themselves to give you a name among the wielders of the pen, but the noble and true spirit of Philosophy which they help to develop makes them appear of secondary importance, and gives you a claim to a higher renown than the mere word-mongers of Parnassus can ever aspire to.” Lowell, in replying to this letter, wrote: “My ‘Prometheus’ has not received a single public notice yet, though I have been puffed to repletion for poems without a tithe of its merit. Your letter was the first sympathy I received. Although such great names as Goethe, Byron, and Shelley have all handled the subject in modern times, you will find that I have looked at it from a somewhat new point of view. I have made it radical, and I believe that no poet in this age can write much that is good unless he give himself up to this tendency. For radicalism has now for the first time taken a distinctive and acknowledged shape of its own. So much of its spirit as poets in former ages have attained (and from their purer organization they could not fail of some) was by instinct rather than by reason. It has never till now been seen to be one of the two great wings that upbear the universe.” In the same letter he says: “The proof of poetry is, in my mind, whether it reduces to the essence of a single line the vague philosophy which is floating in all men’s minds, and so renders it portable and useful and ready to the hand. Is it not so? At least no poem ever makes me respect its author which does not in some way convey a truth of philosophy.”

In the same temper which produced “Prometheus,” he wrote what he regarded as in some way a companion piece, “A Glance behind the Curtain,” in which he imagines a conversation between Cromwell and Hampden. There is no seeming endeavor at characterization of either figure, dramatically, but the poem, which is an attempt to read Cromwell’s mind, is a stirring and indignant demand that Freedom shall do her perfect work.

“Freedom hath yet a work for me to do,” he makes Cromwell exclaim:—

Thus, in the guise of Cromwell, speaks the young man dimly conscious, in a travailing age, of work needing to be done, and stirred too by the high emotions of the woman he loved, yet not quite able to translate his vague desire to be a champion of Truth into deeds. To be sure, at the close of this poem he remembers that Cromwell was the friend of Milton,

In the dreams of his youth I think he saw himself playing a part in the drama that was opening, and wondering how he could wield the pen so as to make it a weapon for slaying wrong or defending right. Yet direct as he might wish his attack to be, he was held back by an equally potent impulse to fulfil the demands of art. “A Chippewa Legend,” in this same volume, though used as a parable for an impassioned denunciation of slavery, has touches of nature in the unfolding of the story which show clearly how much delight he took in the story itself, and how easily he might have stopped short as a singer, if the preacher in him had not made the song turn out a sermon.

The autobiographic element in this volume of “Poems” is most distinctly summed up in a sonnet which dropped out of later collections containing most of the other poems. It bears the title “On my twenty-fourth Birthday, February 22, 1843,” and marks well his own sense of a certain transition which had taken place in his growth.

In “A Year’s Life” the l’envoi of the volume is a timid poem, “Goe, little booke!” in which the poet, sending his venture out among strangers and most likely among apathetic readers, comforts himself with the reflection:—

The “L’Envoi” of “Poems” is addressed to M. W. and is an open confession of the indebtedness of his love, three years after the veiled disclosure in “Ianthe,” “Irene,” “Isabel,” and other figurings of his affection, and runs like a golden thread through all the warp and woof of his imagination and fancy. In this serious poem, which he retained in his later collections, though without the declarative initials,[39] Lowell intimates very clearly that his maturer outlook on life, and his attitude toward poetry are due largely to the inspiration which he has derived from the aspirations of his betrothed. Not only has his love for her quickened his eye of faith, but he has caught a wider view and a firmer hold on the great realities of the spirit through the contagion of her lofty idealism and its fervent expression in a moral ardor. This is especially manifest in a long passage which has been omitted from the poem in later collections. There are portions of this omitted passage which are little better than a dissertation on the poet’s mission, and they were wisely dropped, but they drew after them by necessity a few verses which have an interest as recording in a candid fashion the change which had come over the poet’s mind in these three years just past. After the introductory lines, in which he speaks rather disdainfully of “A Year’s Life,” and intimates that he has grown a sadder and a wiser man, yet with no lessening of that trust in God which was so marked a characteristic of his betrothed, he goes on:—

It would be joy enough, he proceeds, if he could so measure joy, to rest in this contentment of loving and being loved, but life had nobler destinies, and he rejoiced that she who gave him her love had a larger conception of poetry, and so he passes to an analysis of the true aims of poesy, which finally takes the turn of considering the possibility of satisfying these aims by rendering the landscape of America into verse,—

and so continues as preserved in the present form of the poem.

It will be seen thus that this volume of “Poems,” taken as a register of Lowell’s development, marks a greater sureness of himself, a more definite determination of aim, a confidence in powers whose precise range he cannot yet measure, and with all this a swaying now toward the expression of pure delight in art, now toward the use of his art for the accomplishment of some great purpose. It is noticeable, also, that in “A Year’s Life” there is no trace of humor and scarcely any singular felicity of phrase; in “Poems,” wit and humor begin to play a little on the surface. There can be little doubt that the direct influence of Maria White was toward what may without offence be called the practical issue, and this not because she was utilitarian—on the contrary, Lowell felt called on to defend her against the charge of being a transcendentalist, the charge implying a reproach as of a mere visionary; no, it was a certain high, even exalted and enthusiastic allegiance to Truth which dominated her nature, made her in a degree to accept this allegiance as sign of a mission which she was to fulfil, rendered her eager to have the close coöperation of her lover, and made him almost feverishly desirous of justifying her faith by his works. A letter which she wrote to Mr. Briggs, though it anticipates a little the course of this narrative, may be cited here as throwing some further light on her nature.

The book which this letter speaks of as absorbing Lowell’s time and thought was his “Conversations on Some of the Old Poets,” for which Miss White made a cover design and which was published by John Owen early in January, 1845. It will be remembered that Lowell began in the Boston Miscellany and continued in the Pioneer some studies on the Old Dramatists. The series might have gone on at greater length, for he was working a vein which yielded him great delight, and never indeed ceased to engage his attention. He resumed the theme in the last considerable venture of his life, and gave a course of lectures at the Lowell Institute in the spring of 1887, which was in effect a series of readings from the dramatists with running comments. “When I selected my topic for this new venture,” he said to his audience at the opening of the course, “I was returning to a first love. The second volume I ever printed, in 1843 I think it was,[42]—it is now a rare book, I am not sorry to know; I have not seen it for many years,—was mainly about the Old English Dramatists, if I am not mistaken. I dare say it was crude enough, but it was spontaneous and honest.”

The suspension of the Pioneer left Lowell without any convenient vehicle for carrying further these appreciative papers, and he projected a book partly because the subject was in his mind, partly because he was anxious to turn his printed matter to fresh account, but chiefly, it must be inferred from the contents of the book, because he was eager to have freedom of speech on several matters which lay close to his mind. He resolved, therefore, to remodel his papers, so far as he used them at all, into a series of conversations. His work upon the book was hurried, as the letter last quoted from Miss White intimates. In September, 1844, he was planning a course of four or five lectures on English poetry, beginning with Chaucer, which he proposed delivering in Philadelphia in the winter immediately after his marriage; but he seems suddenly to have changed his mind, and to have tossed what he might have prepared into this new book, which opens with a long conversation on Chaucer,—a conversation split in the next edition into two. The passages from Chaucer which he quotes are drawn sometimes from the modernization by Wordsworth, but are also, in some cases, his own much closer simplification of the original. To the ear they depart very little from the original, the widest departure being in getting rid of the final e. The talk on Chaucer is followed by comments on Chapman and Ford, with reference by easy suggestion to Shakespeare, Marlowe, Fletcher, Pope, and Wordsworth.

But though the staple of the “Conversations” is poetry, and there are generous examples and much keen appreciation of the poets discussed, the book would interest a reader to-day less by its treatment of the subjects which gave it excuse for being than by its free and careless exhibition of Lowell’s mind on topics of current concern. There is very little of dramatic assumption in the interlocutors. Philip and John are simply convenient personages playing at a battledore and shuttlecock game of words. Philip is the major character, who does all of the reading and advances most of the propositions, but John, whose chief part is to start Philip by questions, and to interpose occasional jibes or independent observations, is not differentiated in manner; he is another of Lowell’s many selves, and may be taken as the critical, interrupting side of his mind.[43] But both speakers are after the same game.

One of the agreeable touches in the volume is in the asides with which Lowell refers to contemporary authors like Hawthorne and Longfellow, to Page, to Dwight, and to such beginners as W. W. Story and R. C., and when he takes up for discussion a recent address by the Rev. Mr. Putnam. These references and allusions help one to understand the attitude which Lowell took toward his book. He did not deceive himself as to its importance. It was a prolongation of his magazine work and gave him an opportunity to free his mind. The form, as I have intimated, was not that of a true conversation; it is far removed from such excellent exemplars as the “Imaginary Conversations” of Landor, the first of which had appeared a score of years before; it had but little of the graceful fencing which brings the talkers closer and closer to the heart of a subject, till one makes the final thrust that disarms his antagonist. No; it was simply a device to secure flexibility and discursiveness, and is talk run mad, sometimes an harangue, sometimes an epigram, most often a rapid flow of views on literature and life. “If some of the topics introduced seem foreign to the subject,” says Lowell, in his prefatory address To the Reader, “I can only say that they are not so to my mind, and that an author’s object in writing criticisms is not only to bring to light the beauties of the works he is considering, but also to express his own opinions upon those and other matters.”

The reading which lies behind the talk is varied, and the talker speaks from a full mind, but there is none of that restraint of art which gives weight to the words and makes one wish to read again and again the reflections. The cleverness is of the showy sort, and an interesting comparison could be drawn between the portions of the book which relate directly to the dramatists and the more mellow discussion of the same subject in the latest of Lowell’s published prose. But despite the crudeness which marks the earlier book, it shares with the later that delightful spontaneity and first hand intelligence which make Lowell always worth attention when he speaks on literary art. It was characteristic of him that when at sixty-eight he discoursed on the dramatists whom he had been reading all his life, he had not the need and apparently not the curiosity to turn back and see what he said about them at twenty-five. There was little, if any, of the careful husbandry of his ideas which marks some men of letters; out of the abundance of the heart his mouth spoke.

In no one of his books can the reader discern better the spontaneous element in Lowell’s mind, and the length to which he could go under the impulse of the immediate thought. So fluent was he, so unaware of any effort, and so swept away for the time being by the stream of his ideas, that he seemed to himself as one possessed, and more than once he hinted darkly that he was not writing the book, but was the spokesman for sages and poets who used him as their means of communication. The visionary faculty which he possessed could easily be confused at this time with the half-rapt condition of the mind fed with emotional ardor. The book, as we have seen, was written at full speed, and it reflects the generous nature of the writer; but it reflects also the untempered thought, and registers judgments in the process of making.

Running through the entire book, and making the real excuse for it, is Lowell’s study of the essence of poetry. This is what gives to the volume its chief interest; it is really a half-conscious explication of the concern which was most agitating his mind at this time. What was poetry? Could it be the substance of a man’s life? There is a prosecution of some of the same problems which recently he had been trying to solve in his own volume of poems. He had to ask himself if he was a poet. The witness for that was to be found not so much in his taste and his preferences in literature, nor solely in the delight which he took in versification; he felt the stirring in his nature of that high vocation of the poet which makes him a seer and an interpreter. His impulse was to yield to it, but the question arose, What was he to interpret? What was there in life about him which was crying out for articulation? And here, if I mistake not, he fell into some confusion of mind through the insistence of one particular incarnation of divine thought. He was conscious and aware of a momentous idea, that of freedom expressed in terms of human brotherhood, words which even then had the dull ring of cant when they were used by counterfeit-minded men, yet had in the minds of genuine men and women a vibrant and exultant sound as if they were to pay all the debts of poor human nature. Remembering that this was on the eve of ’48, when the visionaries of Europe and America were very sure that they saw a great light, one sees how forcible this idea could be as a motive in the throbbing and ingenuous heart of a young American who was quite sure he was called to high endeavor.

But with the shrewdness which belonged to his mother wit, Lowell could not satisfy himself with merely windy utterances. He needed emphatically to kindle something with his divine flame. As he says of Lessing: “His genius was not a St. Elmo’s fire, as it so often is with mere poets,—as it was in Shelley, for example, playing in ineffectual flame about the points of his thoughts, but was interfused with his whole nature and made a part of his very being.” Now he found himself confronting a monstrous denial of this truth of freedom issuing in human brotherhood when he contemplated slavery in America, and his natural indignation was heightened by the ardor of the woman he loved. Was he not, after all, to be a reformer beyond everything else? and where was the point of contact between the poet and the reformer? His mind circled about this problem; his convictions called upon him with a loud voice to make good his professions; his instinctive sense of congruity, which is hardly more than an alternate form of the sense of humor, forbade him to make poetry the maid of all work for the anti-slavery cause, and he sought diligently to resolve this particular form of spiritual activity into the elemental properties of freedom, and so to find therein a true medium for the sustenance of poetry. Moreover, though he described himself not long after, in “A Fable for Critics,” as—

it must be said with emphasis that he held these isms too lightly for them to become the determining factor in his intellectual and spiritual growth. They did hamper him, as he says a little ruefully in the next line, and while it is idle business to speculate on what a man might have become in the absence of the very conditions that made him what he was, one is tempted to wonder if with his endowments Lowell might not, under less strenuous conditions, have been exclusively a poet. What is one man’s meat is another man’s poison, says the homely adage, and it is a curious fact that but for the same flame of anti-slavery passion Whittier might never have been more than a verbose Quietist versifier.

In his dedication of the volume to his father, Lowell speaks of it as “containing many opinions from which he will wholly, yet with the large charity of a Christian heart, dissent,” and the most flagrant of these is probably in a passage in which he speaks with vehemence of the church and religion. As falls to the hearer of many impulsive utterances of young men, one is apt to see in them rather the impatience of a generous heart (“why so hot, my little man?”) than the deliberate convictions into which one has been forced reluctantly, but the passage is so characteristic of Lowell at this period and so expressive of the turbulence of his mind that it may well be read here. John has been commenting on the innate piety of Chaucer as illustrated by his glowing words on the daisy, and Philip takes up the parable.

These kindling words are those of a reformer dealing with existing conditions. It would be much more to the point if we could have in definite terms that revelation of the inner verity of religion which visited Lowell a little earlier than this, as may be seen by a passage from a letter to Dr. Loring, 20 September, 1842. “I had a revelation last Friday evening. I was at Mary’s, and happening to say something of the presence of spirits (of whom, I said, I was often dimly aware), Mr. Putnam entered into an argument with me on spiritual matters. As I was speaking the whole system rose up before me like a vague Destiny looming from the abyss. I never before so clearly felt the spirit of God in me and around me. The whole room seemed to me full of God. The air seemed to wave to and fro with the presence of Something, I knew not what. I spoke with the calmness and clearness of a prophet.”[44]

No doubt this ecstasy may be regarded as one manifestation of that psychical temper which caused him to see visions in his childhood, but it allied itself with intellectual processes, for he goes on to say: “I cannot tell you what this revelation was. I have not yet studied it enough. But I shall perfect it one day, and then you shall hear it and acknowledge its grandeur. It embraces all other systems.”

We may not find a clear statement of this mystic revelation in the discursive “Conversations;” rather we should look for it in his poems of this period, and here, though we find nothing whatever to correspond to a system of divine order, we do find, recurring in various forms, a recognition of an all-embracing, all-penetrating power which through the poet transmutes nature into something finer and more eternal, and gives him a vantage ground from which to perceive more truly the realities of life. “The Token,” “An Incident in a Railroad Car,” “The Shepherd of King Admetus,” all in a manner witness to this, and show how persistently in Lowell’s mind was present this aspect of the poet which makes him a seer. Perhaps there is a more direct attempt at expressing this truth in one of the poems not retained in later collections. It is entitled “A Dirge,” and is the imagined plaint over a poet who has died. In this tumultuous period of Lowell’s youth, when the tranquillity which a returned love brought was after all a very self-conscious tranquillity, there was always room for morbid fancies, and the frequency with which in his poetry he recurs to the images of death leads one to suspect that he experimented a little with the idea of his own death. And it may be that in this poem, which a healthier judgment later led him to suppress, he was dramatizing himself.