keeps them so intensely alive, and reduced to a series of reasoned arguments and abstract judgments, we should often be made painfully aware that the arguments were defective and the judgments unsound; that neither, in a word, resulted from the logical application of a consistent body of critical principles to the work under discussion. Taking the essays as they actually are, we are also forced to confess that they are rambling in structure, and abound in indefensible vagaries of detail. Such adverse comments must be made in Lowell's case, when we refrain from making them in the case of lesser critics, for the very reason that his work is richer and finer than that of his fellows, and consequently demands measurement by standards that we would not think of applying to the work of men like Whipple and Ripley, or even to the product of the pronounced but narrow genius of Poe. But when all these reservations have been made, the final verdict must probably be registered in some such terms as these of Professor Charles Eliot Norton:

"There are no literary studies in the language more instinct with the true spirit of critical appreciation, none which may serve better as an introduction not merely to the work of special poets, but to English poetry in general."

During the last half-century literary criticism, the world over, has undergone a marked transformation of method and aim. No longer content, as in the past, with the analysis, exposition, and judgment of literary productions, it has come to realize that its business is also to account for them. That is, it must do what it can to explain the conditions under which a work is produced, show how it has been moulded by the form and pressure of the time and

place in which it has appeared, and seek also to bring it into its proper historical relations with what has gone before. A powerful impetus toward this new trend of criticism was given by the publication of Taine's masterly account of the history of English literature, which minimized the importance of personality in literary production, and insisted upon the all-important influence of environment and racial characteristics. Although this influence was overemphasized by Taine and his followers, his work in pointing it out was salutary, and permanently enlarged the scope of criticism. At the same time that the doctrine of Taine was making itself felt, the philosophy of evolution was finding its way into men's minds, and gradually working a vast transformation in their outlook upon nature, society, and art. Once fixed in the consciousness, the evolutionary doctrine acted as a universal solvent upon the artificial distinctions and classifications of the past; all fixity of natural type was seen to be illusive, and the rigid definitions of science came to be viewed in their true character as ideal constructions serving a provisional purpose. No department of thought has remained unmodified. by the evolutionary organon, and literary criticism has come quite noticeably under its influence. It has been applied consciously and systematically to the study of literature by such men as Symonds and Brunetière, and it is traceable, at least as a semiconscious influence, in the work of the newer schools of criticism everywhere.

In this country, which thus far has not made of criticism the serious business that has been made of it in France, Germany, and England, we cannot point to many deliberate and thoroughgoing applications to literature of the evolutionary principle.

Nevertheless, we may find it clearly at work, by implication rather than by direct expression, in many quarters. Poe died long before it was in the air,. but Emerson had prophetic glimpses of it, and his later essays show some traces of its direct influence. Whipple and Lowell remained until the end almost untouched by it, but Walt Whitman (1819-1892), born in the same year with them, felt the ferment in his receptive but unregulated mind, and many passages crop out in his writings to prove him a sort of inchoate evolutionist. From a professional rhapsode we do not expect formal criticism, and we certainly do not get it from Whitman, but his prefaces to the several editions of "Leaves of Grass" are documents that cannot be ignored, and there is much pregnant critical suggestion in his "Democratic Vistas," his essay on "Poetry To-day in America," and his random comment on Burns and Carlyle, on Shakespeare and Tennyson. If we do not distinctly gather the meaning of his pleas for democratic poetry and his diatribes against the feudal spirit in literature, our study of his prose is far from going unrewarded, for it brings us into contact with a rugged and interesting personality, and convinces us that genuine ideas are struggling for expression in his uncouth and formless paragraphs.

After Poe, the most important critic (as well as poet) produced by Southern influences was Sidney Lanier (1842-1881), whose life, like that of his chief predecessor, was cut too short for the full realization of its powers. Poetry and music were Lanier's leading interests, but in his later years he turned more and more to criticism, convinced that it needed to be re-established upon a scientific basis, and persuaded that he had the power to be helpful in such a recon

struction. How strongly he felt on this subject appears in his complaint embodied in a letter to E. C. Stedman, that, "in all directions the poetic art is suffering from the shameful circumstance that criticism is without a scientific basis for even the most elementary of its judgments." His critical writing is contained in "The Science of English Verse," "The English Novel and the Principles of Its Development," Shakespeare and His Forerunners," and the volume of essays entitled "Music and Poetry." These works suffer under a twofold disadvantage. They were (except the last) prepared as courses of lectures, and their publication (except in the case of the first) was posthumous, and consequently without revision. Both in his verse and his criticism Lanier rather forced the relation between poetry and music, and his scholarly equipment was inadequate to the ambitious tasks which he set himself in these lecturecourses that were afterwards made into books. But he brought to his discourses upon literary art the insight of a poet and the sympathies of a richlyendowed nature, and these qualities are sometimes better worth while than a gift for abstract theory. In Lanier's case, they go far to make up for technical limitations, and to outweigh his defects.

New York journalism has already been brought into this sketch through the connection of Margaret Fuller and George Ripley with the literary editorship of the "Tribune." With that newspaper the labors of James Bayard Taylor (1825-1878) are also associated, and with other newspapers the names of Richard Grant White (1821-1885) and Richard Henry Stoddard (1825-1903). Taylor wrote a good deal of criticism of scholarly character, but his chief service to literature, aside from his creative work, was

done in his translation of "Faust," with its rich accompaniment of apparatus. Apart from this, two posthumous volumes, "Studies in German Literature" and "Critical Essays and Literary Notes," must stand for the more lasting part of his work. White is chiefly to be remembered for his Shakespearian work and his discussions of verbal usage rather than for critical writing pure and simple. Stoddard industriously wrote criticism for newspapers and periodicals during a long term of years, but it was mostly fragmentary and ephemeral. A lengthy essay on Poe, prefaced to an edition of that writer's works, is probably his most important critical study, although an interesting collection of other essays might doubtless be made from the newspaper and periodical files of the past fifty years.

Connected also for a time with New York journalism, and intimately associated with the men just mentioned, Edmund Clarence Stedman (1833-) claims far more serious consideration in his critical capacity. Himself a poet of no mean achievement, he has chosen poetry for the special field of his studies, which are embodied in a series of three volumes, "Victorian Poets," "Poets of America," and "The Nature and Elements of Poetry." The first two volumes give us the most complete discussion in existence of the main body of later nineteenth-century poetry in the English language, while the third is a general treatise which serves as their "natural complement," and was prepared for delivery in 1891 as the first course of Turnbull lectures to be given at the Johns Hopkins University. The three volumes together are of such weight and authority that they make Stedman second only to Lowell among American critics. Their author even has the advantage