in the language, and unequaled as portraitures of the Yankee character,
with its cuteness, its homely wit, and its latent poetry. Under the
racy humor of the dialect--which became in Lowell's hands a medium of
literary expression almost as effective as Burns's Ayrshire
Scotch--burned that moral enthusiasm and that hatred of wrong and
deification of duty--"Stern daughter of the voice of God"--which, in
the tough New England stock, stands instead of the passion in the blood
of southern races. Lowell's serious poems on political questions, such
as the _Present Crisis_, _Ode to Freedom_, and the _Capture of Fugitive
Slaves_, have the old Puritan fervor, and such lines as

"They are slaves who dare not be
In the right with two or three,"

and the passage beginning

"Truth forever on the scaffold, Wrong forever on the throne,"

became watchwords in the struggle against slavery and disunion. Some
of these were published in his volume of 1848 and the collected edition
of his poems, in two volumes, issued in 1850. These also included his
most ambitious narrative poem, the _Vision of Sir Launfal_, an
allegorical and spiritual treatment of one of the legends of the Holy
Grail. Lowell's genius was not epical, but lyric and didactic. The
merit of _Sir Launfal_ is not in the telling of the story, but in the
beautiful descriptive episodes, one of which, commencing,

"And what is so rare as a day in June?
Then if ever come perfect days,"