in _Sir Launfal_ was drawn from it. But why do I send you this
description,--like the bones of a chicken I had picked? Simply because
I was so happy as I stood there, and felt so sure of doing something
that would justify my friends. But why do I not say that I have done
something? I believe that I have done better than the world knows yet;
but the past seems so little compared with the future.... I am the
first poet who has endeavored to express the American Idea, and I
shall be popular by and by."

It is not very likely that Lowell was thinking of _Sir Launfal_ when
he wrote this last sentence, yet it is not straining language too far
to say that when he took up an Arthurian story he had a different
attitude toward the whole cycle of legends from that of Tennyson, who
had lately been reviving the legends for the pleasure of
English-reading people. The exuberance of the poet as he carols of
June in the prelude to Part First is an expression of the joyous
spring which was in the veins of the young American, glad in the sense
of freedom and hope. As Tennyson threw into his retelling of Arthurian
romance a moral sense, so Lowell, also a moralist in his poetic
apprehension, made a parable of his tale, and, in the broadest
interpretation of democracy, sang of the leveling of all ranks in a
common divine humanity. There is a subterranean passage connecting the
_Biglow Papers_ with _Sir Launfal_; it is the holy zeal which attacks
slavery issuing in this fable of a beautiful charity, Christ in the
guise of a beggar.

The invention is a very simple one, and appears to have been suggested
by Tennyson's _Sir Galahad_, though Lowell had no doubt read Sir
Thomas Malory's _Morte d'Arthur_. The following is the note which
accompanied _The Vision_ when first published in 1848, and retained by