It was the solution of a great historical problem, like that of
Constitutional Government _versus_ the Stuarts, and it ought to be
treated from a national and not a sectional stand-point.

The live men of that time became abolitionists as inevitably as their
forefathers became supporters of the Declaration of Independence. If
Webster and Everett had been born twenty years later, they must needs
have become anti-slavery, too. Those of Lowell's friends, like George S.
Hillard and George B. Loring, who for social or political reasons took
the opposite side, afterwards found themselves left in the lurch by an
adverse public opinion.

It was the Mexican war that first aroused Lowell to the seriousness of
the extension of slavery, and it was meeting a recruiting officer in the
streets of Boston, "covered all over with brass let alone that which
nature had set on his countenance," which inspired his writing the
first of the "Biglow Papers." They were hastily and carelessly written,
and Lowell himself held them in slight estimation as literature; but they
became immediately popular, as no poetry had that he had published
previously. Their freshness and directness appealed to the manliness and
good sense of the average New Englander, and the whole community
responded to them with repeated applause. There is, after all, much
poetry in the Biglow Papers, the more genuine because unintentional; but
they are full of the keenest wit and a proverbial philosophy which, if
less profound than Emerson's, is more capable of a practical application.

The vernacular in which they are written must have been learned at
Concord,--perhaps on the front stoop of the Middlesex Hotel,--while
Lowell was listening to the pithy conversation of Yankee farmers, not