Declining, as I do, to separate style in expression from style in the
thought that informs it--for they who make such a separation can hardly
know that style should be in the very conception of a phrase, in its
antenatal history, else the word is neither choice nor authentic--I
recognise in Mr. Lowell, as a prose author, a sense of proportion and a
delicacy of selection not surpassed in the critical work of this critical
century. Those small volumes, _Among My Books_ and _My Study
Windows_, are all pure literature. A fault in criticism is the rarest
thing in them. I call none to mind except the strange judgment on Dr.
Johnson: 'Our present concern with the Saxons is chiefly a literary one.
. . Take Dr. Johnson as an instance. The Saxon, as it appears to me, has
never shown any capacity for art,' and so forth. One wonders how Lowell
read the passage on Iona, and the letter to Lord Chesterfield, and the
Preface to the Dictionary without conviction of the great English
writer's supreme art--art that declares itself and would not be hidden.
But take the essay on Pope, that on Chaucer, and that on one Percival, a
writer of American verse of whom English readers are not aware, and they
prove Lowell to have been as clear in judging as he was exquisite in
sentencing. His essay 'On a Certain Condescension in Foreigners' is
famous, but an equal fame is due to 'My Garden Acquaintance' and 'A Good
Word for Winter.' His talk about the weather is so full of wit that one
wonders how prattlers at a loss for a topic dare attempt one so rich. The
birds that nest in his syringas seem to be not his pensioners only, but
his parishioners, so charmingly local, so intent upon his chronicle does
he become when he is minded to play White of Selborne with a smile. And
all the while it is the word that he is intent upon. You may trace his
reading by some fine word that has not escaped him, but has been garnered
for use when his fan has been quick to purge away the chaff of
commonplace. He is thus fastidious and alert in many languages. You