Emerson."--_W. C. Brownell_, in _Scribner's Magazine_, _February,_
1907.

* * * * *

"Lowell is a poet who seems to represent New England more variously
than either of his comrades. We find in his work, as in theirs, her
loyalty and moral purpose. She has been at cost for his training, and
he in turn has read her heart, honoring her as a mother before the
world, and seeing beauty in her common garb and speech.... If Lowell
be not first of all an original genius, I know not where to look for
one. Judged by his personal bearing, who is brighter, more persuasive,
more equal to the occasion than himself,--less open to Doudan's
stricture upon writers who hoard and store up their thoughts for the
betterment of their printed works? Lowell's treasury can stand the
drafts of both speech and composition. Judged by his works, as a poet
in the end must be, he is one who might gain by revision and
compression. But think, as is his due, upon the high-water marks of
his abundant tide, and see how enviable the record of a poet who is
our most brilliant and learned critic, and who has given us our best
native idyll, our best and most complete work in dialectic verse, and
the noblest heroic ode that America has produced--each and all ranking
with the first of their kinds in English literature of the modern
time."--_Edmund Clarence Stedman_.

* * * * *

"As a racy humorist and a brilliant wit using verse as an instrument
of expression, he has no clear superior, probably no equal, so far at
least as American readers are concerned, among writers who have