which our civil war has made to song. It was charged with the grave
emotion of one who not only shared the patriotic grief and exultation
of his _alma mater_ in the sacrifice of her sons, but who felt a more
personal sorrow in the loss of kindred of his own, fallen in the front
of battle. Particularly note-worthy in this memorial ode are the
tribute to Abraham Lincoln, the third strophe beginning, "Many loved
Truth;" the exordium, "O Beautiful! my Country! ours once more!" and
the close of the eighth strophe, where the poet chants of the youthful
heroes who

"Come transfigured back,
Secure from change in their high-hearted ways,
Beautiful evermore and with the rays
Of morn on their white Shields of Expectation."

From 1857 to 1862 Lowell edited the _Atlantic Monthly_, and from 1863
to 1872 the _North American Review_. His prose, beginning with an
early volume of _Conversations on Some of the Old Poets_, 1844, has
consisted mainly of critical essays on individual writers, such as
Dante, Chaucer, Spenser, Emerson, Shakespeare, Thoreau, Pope, Carlyle,
etc., together with papers of a more miscellaneous kind, like
_Witchcraft_, _New England Two Centuries Ago_, _My Garden
Acquaintance_, _A Good Word for Winter_, _Abraham Lincoln_, etc., etc.
Two volumes of these were published in 1870 and 1876, under the title
_Among My Books_, and another, _My Study Windows_, in 1871. As a
literary critic Lowell ranks easily among the first of living writers.
His scholarship is thorough, his judgment keen, and he pours out upon
his page an unwithholding wealth of knowledge, humor, wit, and
imagination from the fullness of an overflowing mind. His prose has
not the chastened correctness and "low tone" of Matthew Arnold's. It