of poetry give it; they appeal to a limited faculty, and not to the whole man. It is not Linnæus or Cavendish or Cuvier who gives us the true sense of animals, or water, or plants, who seizes their secret for us, who makes us participate in their life; it is Shakespeare, with his

"Daffodils

That come before the swallow dares, and take
The winds of March with beauty;"

it is Wordsworth, with his

“Voice. . . . heard

In spring-time from the cuckoo-bird,
Breaking the silence of the seas

Among the farthest Hebrides ;"

it is Keats, with his

"moving waters at their priestlike task

Of cold ablution round Earth's human shores ;"

it is Chateaubriand, with his, "cîme indéterminée des forêts;" it is Senancour, with his mountain birchtree: "cette écorce blanche, lisse et crevassée; cette tige agreste; ces branches qui s'inclinent vers la terre; la mobilité des feuilles, et tout cet abandon, simplicité de la nature, attitude des déserts."

JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL.

1819-1891.

[Mr. Lowell's literary essays represent the highest order of criticism that has appeared in America. The two volumes of "6 Among My Books" and the collection called "My Study Windows" contain strong and original thought, unusual scholarship, and a poet's own power of feeling for poetry. Mr. Lowell was learned, and his learning did not dull him æsthetically, or blur his tact in distinguishing relative literary values. In criticism, as in his whole broad nature, he grew better as he grew old. Though the latter part of his life was not concentrated upon literature, his last essays are even superior in manner to the more elaborate works of his prime, and if less copiously instructive, are still more agreeable. The concluding pages of one of these, the essay on Gray, are given here, by permission of Messrs. Houghton, Miflin & Co.]

From the Essay on Gray, in "Last Essays."

IN spite of unjust depreciation and misapplied criticism, Gray holds his own and bids fair to last as long as the language which he knew how to write so well and of which he is one of the glories. Wordsworth is justified in saying that he helped himself from everybody and everywhere; and yet he made such admirable use of what he stole (if theft there was) that we should as soon think of finding fault with a man for pillaging the dictionary. He mixed

himself with whatever he took-an incalculable increment. In the editions of his poems, the thin line of text stands at the top of the page like cream, and below it is the skim-milk drawn from many milky mothers of the herd out of which it is risen. But the thing to be considered is that, no matter where the material came from, the result is Gray's own. Whether original or not, he knew how to make a poem, a vary rare knowledge among men. The thought in Gray is neither uncommon nor profound, and you may call it beatified commonplace if you choose. I shall not contradict you. I have lived long enough to know that there is a vast deal of commonplace in the world of no particular use to anybody, and am thankful to the man who has the divine gift to idealize it for me. Nor am I offended with the odor of the library that hangs about Gray, for it recalls none but delightful sensations. It was in the very best literature that Gray was steeped, and I am glad that both he and we should profit by it. If he appropriated a fine phrase wherever he found it, it was by right of eminent domain, for surely he was one of the masters of language. His praise is that what he touched was idealized, and kindled with some virtue that was not there before, but came from him.

And he was the most conscientious of artists. Some of the verses which he discards in reference to this conscientiousness of form which sacrifices the poet to the poem, the part to the whole, and regards nothing but the effect to be produced, would have

made the fortune of another poet. Take, for example, this stanza omitted from the "Elegy" (just before the epitaph), because, says Mason, "he thought it was too long a parenthesis in this place:"

"There scattered oft, the earliest of the year,

By hands unseen are showers of violets found;
The redbreast loves to build and warble there,
And little footsteps lightly print the ground."

Gray might run his pen through this, but he could not obliterate it from the memory of men. Surely Wordsworth himself never achieved a simplicity of language so pathetic in suggestion, so musical in movement as this.

Any slave of the mine may find the rough gem, but it is the cutting and polishing that reveal its heart of fire; it is the setting that makes of it a jewel to hang at the ear of Time. If Gray cull his words and phrases here, there, and everywhere, it is he who charges them with the imagination or picturesque touch which only he could give and which makes them magnetic. For example, in these two verses of "The Bard:"

"Amazement in his van with Flight combined,

And Sorrow's faded form and Solitude behind !"

The suggestion (we are informed by the notes) came from Cowper and Oldham, and the amazement combined with flight sticks fast in prose. But the personification of Sorrow and the fine generalization of Solitude in the last verse which gives an imaginative reach to the whole passage are Gray's

own. The owners of what Gray "conveyed" would have found it hard to identify their property and prove title to it after it had once suffered the Graychange by steeping in his mind and memory.

When the example in our Latin Grammar tells us that Mors communis est omnibus, it states a truism of considerable interest, indeed, to the person in whose particular case it is to be illustrated, but neither new nor startling. No one would think of citing it, whether to produce conviction or to heighten discourse. Yet mankind are agreed in finding something more poignant in the same reflection when Horace tells us that the palace as well as the hovel shudders at the indiscriminating foot of Death. Here is something more than the dry statement of a truism. The difference between the two is that between a lower and a higher; it is, in short, the difference between prose and poetry. The oyster has begun, at least, to secrete its pearl, something identical with its shell in substance, but in sentiment and association how unlike! Malherbe takes the same image and makes it a little more picturesque, though, at the same time, I fear, a little more Parisian, too, when he says that the sentinel pacing before the gate of the Louvre cannot forbid Death an entrance to the King. And how long had not that comparison between the rose's life and that of the maiden dying untimely been a commonplace when the same Malherbe made it irreclaimably his own by mere felicity of phrase? We do not asl: where people got their hints, but what they made