his degree at Harvard. His first production in print, a class poem, appeared at this time. This was succeeded, in 1841, by a collection of poems -A Year's Life. It was marked by a youthful delicacy and sensibility, with a leaning to transcendental expression, but teeming with proofs of the poetic nature, particularly in a certain vein of tenderness. In January, 1843, he commenced, in conjunction with his friend Mr. Robert Carter, the publication of The Pioneer, a Literary and Critical Magazine, which, though published in the form of a fashionable illustrated magazine, was of too fine a cast to be successful. But three monthly numbers were issued: they contained choice articles from Poe, Neal, Hawthorne, Parsons, Dwight, and others, including the editors. This unsuccessful speculation was an episode in a brief career at the bar, which Mr. Lowell soon relinquished for a literary life. The reception of Mr. Lowell's first poetic volume had been favorable, and encouraged the author's next adventure, a volume containing the Legend of Brittany, Miscellaneous Poems and Sonnets, in 1844. There was a rapid advance in art in these pages, and a profounder study of passion. The leading poem is such a story as would have engaged the heart of Shelley or Keats. A country maiden is betrayed and murdered by a knightly lover. Her corpse is concealed behind the church altar, and the guilty presence made known on a festival day by a voice demanding baptism for the unborn babe in its embrace. The murderer is struck with remorse, and ends his days in repentance. The story thus outlined is delicately told, and its repulsiveness overcome by the graces of poetry and feeling with which it is invested in the character of the heroine Margaret. The poem in blank verse entitled Prometheus, which followed the legend in the volume, afforded new proof of the author's ability. It is mature in thought and expression, and instinct with a lofty imagination. The prophecy of the triumph of love, humanity, and civilization, over the brute and sensual power of Jove, is a fine modern improvement of the old fable. The apologue of Rhacus is also in a delicate, classical spirit.

The next year Mr. Lowell gave the public a volume of prose essays-a series of critical and æsthetic Conversations on some of the Old Poets, Chaucer and the dramatists Chapman and Ford being the vehicles for introducing a liberal stock of reflections on life and literature generally. It is a book of essays, displaying a subtle knowledge of English literature, to which the form of dialogue is rather an incumbrance.

Another series of Poems, containing the spirit of the author's previous volume, followed in 1848. About the same time appeared The Vision of Sir Launfal, founded on a legend of a search for the San Greal. The knight in his dream discovers charity to the suffering to be the holy cup.

As a diversion to the pursuit of sentimental poetry, Mr. Lowell at the close of the year sent forth a rhyming estimate of contemporaries in a Fable for Critics, which, though not without some puerilities, contains a series of sharply drawn portraits in felicitous verse.

The Biglow Papers, edited with an Introduction, Notes, Glossary, and Copious Index, complete

the record of this busy year. The book purports to be written by Homer Wilbur, A.M., Pastor of the First Church in Jaalam and (prospective) Member of many Literary, Learned, and Scientific Societies. It is cast in the Yankee dialect, and is quite an artistic product in that peculiar lingo. The subject is an exposure of the political pretences and shifts which accompanied the war with Mexico, the satire being directed against war and slavery. It is original in style and pungent in effect.

This is Mr. Lowell's last published volume, his time having been since occupied in a residence abroad, though he has occasionally written for the North American Review, Putnam's Magazine, and other journals, and was for a time a stated contributor to the Anti-slavery Standard.

We

He was married in December, 1844, to Miss Maria White, of Watertown, a lady whose literary genius, as exhibited in a posthumous volume privately printed by her husband in 1855, deserves a record in these pages. She was born July 8, 1821, and died October 27, 1853. quote from the memorial volume alluded to, which is occupied with a few delicately simple poems of her composition, chiefly divided between records of foreign travel and domestic pathos, this touching expression of resignation :—

THE ALPINE SHEEP-ADDRESSED TO A FRIEND AFTER THE LOSS
OF A CHILD.

When on my ear your loss was knelled,
And tender sympathy upburst,

A little spring from memory welled,

Which once had quenched my bitter thirst,
And I was fain to bear to you

A portion of its mild relief,
That it might be a healing dew,
To steal some fever from your grief.
After our child's untroubled breath
Up to the Father took its way,
And on our home the shade of Death,
Like a long twilight haunting lay,
And friends came round, with us to weep
Her little spirit's swift remove,
The story of the Alpine sheep

Was told to us by one we love.
They, in the valley's sheltering care,

Soon crop the meadows' tender prime,
And when the sod grows brown and bare,
The Shepherd strives to make them climb
To airy shelves of pasture green,

That hang along the mountain's side,
Where grass and flowers together lean,
And down through mist the sunbeams slide.
But naught can tempt the timid things
The steep and rugged path to try,
Though sweet the shepherd calls and sings,
And scared below the pastures lie,
Till in his arms his lambs he takes,

Along the dizzy verge to go,
Then, heedless of the rifts and breaks,
They follow on o'er rock and snow.
And in those pastures, lifted fair,
More dewy-soft than lowland mead,
The shepherd drops his tender care,
And sheep and lambs together feed.
This parable, by Nature breathed,
Blew on me as the south-wind free

O'er frozen brooks, that flow unsheathed
From icy thraldom to the sea.
A blissful vision, through the night
Would all my happy senses sway
Of the Good Shepherd on the height,
Or climbing up the starry way,
Holding our little lamb asleep,

While, like the murmur of the sea,
Sounded that voice along the deep,

Saying, "Arise and follow me.'

It is to the death of Maria Lowell, at Cambridge, that Mr. Longfellow alludes in his poem published in Putnam's Magazine in April, 1854, entitled

THE TWO ANGELS.

Two angels, one of Life, and one of Death,

Passed o'er the village as the morning broke; The dawn was on their faces, and beneath, The sombre houses hearsed with plumes of smoke. Their attitude and aspect were the same,

Alike their features and their robes of white; But one was crowned with amaranth, as with flame, And one with asphodels, like flakes of light.

I saw them pause on their celestial way,
Then said I, with deep fear and doubt oppressed,
"Beat not so loud, my heart, lest thou betray
The place where thy beloved are at rest!
And he who wore the crown of asphodels,
Descending, at my door began to knock,
And my soul sank within me, as in wells
The waters sink before an earthquake's shock.

I recognised the nameless agony,

The terror and the tremor and the pain, That oft before had filled and haunted me,

And now returned with threefold strength again. The door I opened to my heavenly guest,

And listened, for I thought I heard God's voice, And knowing whatsoe'er he sent was best,

Dared neither to lament nor to rejoice.

Then with a smile that filled the house with light,

66

My errand is not Death, but Life," he said,

And ere I answered, passing out of sight

On his celestial embassy he sped.

'Twas at thy door, O friend! and not at mine, The angel with the amaranthine wreath, Pausing, descended, and with voice divine, Whispered a word that had a sound like Death. Then fell upon the house a sudden gloom,

A shadow on those features fair and thin, And softly, from that hushed and darkened room, Two angels issued, where but one went in. All is of God! If he but wave his hand, The mists collect, the rain falls thick and loud, Till with a smile of light on sea and land,

Lo! he looks back from the departing cloud. Angels of Life and Death alike are His;

Without his leave they pass no threshold o'er; Who then would wish or dare, believing this, Against his messengers to shut the door?

In 1854 Mr. Lowell delivered a course of lectures before the Lowell Institute on English Poetry, including the old ballad writers Chaucer, Pope, and others, to Wordsworth and Tennyson. They were marked by an acute critical spirit and enlivened by wit and fancy.

Mr. Lowell has edited the poems of Andrew

Marvell and Donne in the series of Messrs. Little & Brown's standard edition of the English poets. Early in 1855 he was appointed to the Belles Lettres professorship lately held by Mr. Longfellow in Harvard College, with the privilege of passing a preliminary year in Europe before entering on its duties.

MARGARET-FROM THE LEGEND OF BRITTANY.

Fair as a summer dream was Margaret,-
Such dream as in a poet's soul might start
Musing of old loves while the moon doth set:
Her hair was not more sunny than her heart,
Though like a natural golden coronet

It circled her dear head with careless art, Mocking the sunshine, that would fain have lent To its frank grace a richer ornament.

His loved-one's eyes could poet ever speak,

So kind, so dewy, and so deep were hers,But, while he strives, the choicest phrase too weak, Their glad reflection in his spirit blurs; As one may see a dream dissolve and break Out of his grasp when he to tell it stirs, Like that sad Dryad doomed no more to bless The mortal who revealed her loveliness. She dwelt for ever in a region bright,

Peopled with living fancies of her own,
Where nought could come but visions of delight,
Far, far aloof from earth's eternal moan;

A summer cloud thrilled through with rosy light,
Floating beneath the blue sky all alone,
Her spirit wandered by itself, and won
A golden edge from some unsetting sun.
The heart grows richer that its lot is poor,-
God blesses want with larger sympathies,-
Love enters gladliest at the humble door,
And makes the cot a palace with his eyes;-
So Margaret's heart a softer beauty wore,

And grew in gentleness and patience wise,
For she was but a simple herdsinan's child,
A lily chance-sown in the rugged wild.
There was no beauty of the wood or field
But she its fragrant bosom-secret knew,
Nor any but to her would freely yield
Some grace that in her soul took root and grew;
Nature to her glowed ever new-revealed,

All rosy-fresh with innocent morning dew, And looked into her heart with dim, sweet eyes That left it full of sylvan memories.

O, what a face was hers to brighten light,
And give back sunshine with an added glow,
To wile each moment with a fresh delight,
And part of memory's best contentment grow!
O, how her voice, as with an inmate's right,
Into the strangest heart would welcome go,
And make it sweet, and ready to become
Of white and gracious thoughts the chosen home!
None looked upon her but he straightway thought
Of all the greenest depths of country cheer,
And into each one's heart was freshly brought
What was to him the sweetest time of year
So was her every look and motion fraught

With out-of-door delights and forest lere;
Not the first violet on a woodland lea
Seemed a more visible gift of spring than she.

'AN INCIDENT IN A RAILROAD CAR. He spoke of Burns: men rude and rough Pressed round to hear the praise of one Whose heart was made of manly, simple stuff As homespun as their own.

And, when he read, they forward leaned,
Drinking, with thirsty hearts and ears,
His brook-like songs whom glory never weaned
From humble smiles and tears.

Slowly there grew a tender awe,
Sun-like, o'er faces brown and hard,
As if in him who read they felt and saw
Some presence of the bard.

It was a sight for sin and wrong

And slavish tyranny to see,

A sight to make our faith more pure and strong
In high humanity.

I thought, these men will carry hence
Promptings their former life above,
And something of a finer reverence
For beauty, truth, and love.

God scatters love on every side,
Freely among his children all,

And always hearts are lying open wide,
Wherein some grains may fall.

There is no wind but soweth seeds
Of a more true and open life,

Which burst, unlooked-for, into high-souled deeds,

With wayside beauty rife.

We find within these souls of ours
Some wild germs of a higher birth,
Which in the poet's tropic heart bear flowers
Whose fragrance fills the earth.
Within the hearts of all men lie
These promises of wider bliss.
Which blossom into hopes that cannot die,
In sunny hours like this.
All that hath been majestical
In life or death, since time began,
Is native in the simple heart of all,
The angel heart of man.

And thus, among the untaught poor,
Great deeds and feelings find a home,
That cast in shadow all the golden lore
Of classic Greece and Rome.
O, mighty brother-soul of man,
Where'er thou art, in low or high,
Thy skyey arches with exulting span
O'er-roof infinity!

All thoughts that mould the age begin
Deep down within the primitive soul,
And from the many slowly upward win

To one who grasps the whole:

In his broad breast the feeling deep
That struggled on the many's tongue,
Swells to a tide of thought, whose surges leap
O'er the weak thrones of wrong.

All thought begins in feeling,-wide
In the great mass its base is hid,
And, narrowing up to thought, stands glorified
A moveless pyramid.

Nor is he far astray who deems

That every hope, which rises and grows broad In the world's heart, by ordered impulse streams From the great heart of God.

God wills, man hopes: in common souls

Hope is but vague and undefined,

Till from the poet's tongue the message rolls

A blessing to his kind.

Never did Poesy appear

So full of heaven to me, as when

I saw how it would pierce through pride and fear To the lives of coarsest men.

It may be glorious to write

Thoughts that shall glad the two or three High souls, like those far stars that come in sight Once in a century ;—

But better far it is to speak

One simple word, which now and then
Shall waken their free nature in the weak
And friendless sons of men;

To write some earnest verse or line,
Which, seeking not the praise of art,
Shall make a clearer faith and manhood shine
In the untutored heart.

He who doth this, in verse or prose,
May be forgotten in his day,

But surely shall be crowned at last with those
Who live and speak for aye.

THE FIRST SNOW FALL

The snow had begun in the gloaming,
And busily all the night
Had been heaping field and highway
With a silence deep and white.

Every pine and fir and hemlock

Wore ermine too dear for an earl,
And the poorest twig on the elm-tree
Was ridged inch-deep with pearl.
From sheds, new-roofed with Carrara,
Came chanticleer's muffled crow,
The stiff rails were softened to swan's-down,
And still fluttered down the snow.

I stood and watched by the window
The noiseless work of the sky,
And the sudden flurries of snow-birds
Like brown leaves whirling by.

I thought of a mound in sweet Auburn
Where a little headstone stood,
How the flakes were folding it gently,
As did robins the babes in the wood.

Up spoke our own little Mabel,
Saying, "Father, who makes it snow?"
And I told of the good Allfather

Who cares for us all below.

Again I looked at the snowfall,
And thought of the leaden sky
That arched o'er our first great sorrow,
When that mound was heaped so high

I remembered the gradual patience
That fell from that cloud like snow,
Flake by flake, healing and hiding
The scar of that deep-stabbed woe.
And again to the child I whispered,
"The snow that husheth all,
Darling, the merciful Father

Alone can make it fall?"

Then, with eyes that saw not, I kissed her, And she, kissing back, could not know That my kiss was given to her sister Folded close under deepening snow.

THE COURTIN'.

Zekle crep' up, quite unbeknown,
An' peeked in thru the winder.
An' there sot Huldy all alone,
'ith no one nigh to hender.

Agin' the chimbly crooknecks hung,
An' in amongst 'em rusted

The old queen's arm thet gran'ther Young
Fetched back from Concord busted.

The wannut logs shot sparkles out
Towards the pootiest, bless her!
An' leetle fires danced all about
The chiny on the dresser.
The very room, coz she was in,

Looked warm from floor to ceilin', An' she looked full as rosy agin

Ez th' apples she was peelin'.

She heerd a foot an' knowed it, tu,
Araspin' on the scraper,-
All ways to once her feelins flew
Like sparks in burnt-up paper.
He kin' o' l'itered on the mat,
Some doubtfle o' the seekle;
His heart kep' goin' pitypat,

But hern went pity Zekle.

WILLIAM W. STORY,

THE poet and artist, is the son of the late Judge Story. He was born in Salem, February 19, 1819. He became a graduate of Harvard in 1838, and applied himself diligently, under his father's auspices, to the study of the law. He was a frequent contributor, in prose and verse, to the Boston Miscellany, edited by Mr. Nathan Hale, in 1842. In his legal career he published Reports of Cases argued and determined in the Circuit Court of the United States for the First Circuit, 2 vols. Boston, 1842-5, and A Treatise on the Law of Contracts not under Seal, Boston,

1844.

In the last year he delivered the Phi Beta Kappa poem at Harvard, Nature and Art, an indication of the tastes which were to govern his future life.

His single volume of Poems was published by Messrs. Little and Brown in 1847. They are the productions of a man of cultivated taste, and of a quick susceptibility to impressions of the ideal.

In 1851 Mr. Story discharged an honorable debt to the memory of his father, in the publication of the two diligently prepared volumes of The Life and Letters of Joseph Story, a full, genial biography, written with enthusiasm and fidelity.

It was at this period, or earlier, that Mr. Story turned his attention particularly to art, in which he has achieved much distinction as a sculptor. He has resided for some time in Italy. Among his works, as an artist, are an admired statue of his father, and various busts in marble, including one of his friend Mr. J. R. Lowell. He has modelled a "Shepherd Boy," "Little Red Riding Hood," and other works. Besides achieving success in these varied pursuits of law, letters, and art, Mr. Story is an accomplished musician.

Streets are lonely and deserted, where the sickly lamplights glare,

And the steps of some late passer only break the silence there.

Round the grim and dusky houses, gloomy shadows nestling cower,

Night hath stifled life's deep humming into slumber for an hour.

Sullen furnace fires are glowing over in the suburbs far,

And the lamp in many a homestead shineth like an earthly star.

O'er the hushed and sleeping city, in the cloudless sky above,

Never-fading stars hang watching in eternal peace and love.

Years and centuries have vanished, change hath

Ariadne's crown of splendor-Cassiopeia's shining chair;

Sagittarius and Delphinus, and the clustering Pleiad train,

Aquila and Ophiucus, Pegasus and Charles's Wain; Red Antares and Capella, Aldebaran's mystic light, Alruccabah and Arcturus, Sirius and Vega white; They are circling calm as ever on their sure but hidden path,

As when mystic watchers saw them with the reve rent eye of Faith.

So unto the soul benighted, lofty stars there are, that shine

Far above the mists of error, with a changeless light divine.

Lofty souls of old beheld them, burning in life's shadowy night,

And they still are undecaying 'mid a thousand centuries' flight.

Love and Truth, whose light and blessing, every reverent heart may know,

Mercy, Justice, which are pillars that support this life below;

These in sorrow and in darkness, in the inmost soul

Though unsolved the mighty secret, which shall thread the perfect whole,

And unite the finite number unto the eternal soul, We shall one day clearly see it-for the soul a time shall come,

When unfranchised and unburdened, thought shall be its only home;

And Truth's fitful intimations, glancing on our fearful sight,

Shall be gathered to the circle of one mighty disk of light.

EDWIN PERCY WHIPPLE

WAS born at Gloucester, Massachusetts, March 8, 1819. His father, Matthew Whipple, who died while the son was in his infancy, is described as possessing "strong sense, and fine social powers." One of his ancestors was a signer of the Declaration of Independence. His mother, Lydia Gardiner, was of a family in Maine noted for its mental powers. She early removed to Salem, Massachusetts, where her son was educated at the English High School. At fourteen he published articles in a Salem newspaper; and at fifteen, on leaving school, became a clerk in the Bank of General Interest in that city. He was next employed, in 1837, in the office of a large broker's firin of Boston, and shortly was appointed Superintendent of the News Room of the Merchants' Exchange in State street. He had been a prominent member of the Mercantile Library Association, and one of a club of six which grew out of it, which held its sessions known as "The Attic Nights," for literary exercises and debate. There Whipple was a leader in the display of his quick intellectual fence and repartee, extensive stores of reading, and subtle and copious critical faculty. In 1840 he was introduced to the public by the delivery of a poem before the Mercantile Association, sketching the manners and satirizing the absurdities of the day, according to the standard manner of these productions, which will be hereafter sought for as valuable illustrations of the times. A critical article from his pen, on Macaulay, in the Boston Miscellany for February, 1843, attracted considerable attention. In October of that year, his lecture on the Lives of Authors was deliver ed before the Mercantile Library Association, and from that time he has been prominently before the public as a critic and lecturer, in the leading journals, and at the chief lyceums in the country. He has written in the North American Review, The American Review, Christian Eraminer, Graham's Magazine, and other journals, extensive series of articles on the classical English authors and historical. biographical, and social

topics, marked by their acute characterization and fertility of illustration. His lectures, embracing a similar range of subjects, are philosophical in their texture, marked by nice discrimination, occasionally pushing a favorite theory to the verge of paradox; and when the reasoning faculties of

his audience are exhausted, relieving the discussion by frequent picked anecdote, and pointed thrusts of wit and satire.

He is greatly in request as a lecturer, has probably lectured a thousand times in the cities and towns of the middle and northern states, from St. Louis to Bangor, has on numerous occasions addressed the literary societies of various Colleges, as Brown, Dartmouth, Amherst, the New York University; and in 1850 was the Fourth of July orator before the city authorities of Boston. Two collections of his writings have been published by Messrs. Ticknor & Fields,-Essays and Reviews, in two volumes, and Lectures on Subjects Connected + with Literature and Life.

THE GENIUS OF WASHINGTON.*

How

This illustrious man, at once the world's admiration and enigma, we are taught by a fine instinct to venerate, and by a wrong opinion to misjudge. The might of his character has taken strong hold upon the feelings of great masses of men, but in translating this universal sentiment into an intelligent form, the intellectual element of his wonderful nature is as much depressed as the moral element is exalted, and consequently we are apt to misunderstand both. Mediocrity has a bad trick of idealizing itself in eulogising him, and drags him down to its own low level while assuming to lift him to the skies. many times have we been told that he was not a man of genius, but a person of "excellent common sense," of "admirable judgment," of "rare virtues;" and by a constant repetition of this odious cant, we have nearly succeeded in divorcing comprehension from his sense, insight from his judgment, force from his virtues, and life from the man. Accordingly, in the panegyric of cold spirits, Washington disappears in a cloud of commonplaces; in the rhodomontade of boiling patriots he expires in the agonies of rant. Now the sooner this bundle of mediocre talents and moral qualities, which its contrivers have the audacity to call George Washington, is hissed out of existence, the better it will be for the cause of talent and the cause of morals; contempt of that is the beginning of wisdom. He had no genius, it seems. O no! genius, we must suppose, is the peculiar and shining attribute of some orator, whose tongue can spout patriotic speeches, or some versifier, whose muse can "Hail Columbia," but not of the man who

supported states on his arm, and carried America in his brain. The madcap Charles Townsend, the motion of whose pyrotechnic mind was like the whizz of a hundred rockets, is a man of genius; but George Washington, raised up above the level of even eminent statesmen, and with a nature moving with the still and orderly celerity of a planet round its sun, he dwindles, in comparison, into a kind of angelic dunce? What is genius? Is it worth anything? Is splendid folly the measure of its inspiration? Is wisdom its base and summit,-that which it recedes from, or tends towards? And by what definition do you award the name to the creator of an epic, and deny it to the creator of a country! On what principle is it to be lavished on him who sculptures in perishing marble, the image of possible excellence, and withheld from him who built up in himself a transcendant character, indestructible as the obligations of Duty, and beautiful as her

rewards?

Indeed, if by the genius of action you mean will enlightened by intelligence, and intelligence ener

From an oration, "Washington and the Principles of the Revolution."