wonder at the delicacy of the sense whereby he perceives a choice rhyme
in the Anglo-Norman of Marie de France or a clang of arms in the brief
verse of Peire de Bergerac, or touches sensitively a word whereby Dante
has transcended something sweet in Bernard de Ventadour, or Virgil
somewhat noble in Homer. In his own use, and within his own English, he
has the abstinence and the freshness of intention that keep every word
new for the day's work. He gave to the language, and did not take from
it; it gained by him, and lost not. There are writers of English now at
work who almost convince us of their greatness until we convict them on
that charge: they have succeeded at an unpardonable cost; they are
glorified, but they have beggared the phrases they leave behind them.

Nevertheless Lowell was no poet. To accept his verse as a poet's would
be to confess a lack of instinct, and there is no more grievous lack in a
lover of poetry. Reason, we grant, makes for the full acceptance of his
poems, and perhaps so judicial a mind as his may be forgiven for having
trusted to reason and to criticism. His trust was justified--if such
justification avails--by the admiration of fairly educated people who
apparently hold him to have been a poet first, a humourist in the second
place, and an essayist incidentally. It is hard to believe that he
failed in instinct about himself. More probably he was content to forego
it when he found the ode, the lyric, and the narrative verse all so
willing. They made no difficulty, and he made none; why then are we
reluctant to acknowledge the manifest stateliness of this verse and the
evident grace of that, and the fine thought finely worded? Such
reluctance justifies itself. Nor would I attempt to back it by the cheap
sanctions of prophecy. Nay, it is quite possible that Lowell's poems may
live; I have no commands for futurity. Enough that he enriched the
present with the example of a scholarly, linguistic, verbal love of
literature, with a studiousness full of heart.