ngfellow. His fame has been of slower growth, and his
popularity with the average reader has never been so great. His appeal
has been to the few rather than the many, to an audience of scholars
and of the judicious rather than to the "groundlings" of the general
public. Nevertheless his verse, though without the evenness,
instinctive grace, and unerring good taste of Longfellow's, has more
energy and a stronger intellectual fiber; while in prose he is very
greatly the superior. His first volume, _A Year's Life_, 1841, gave
little promise. In 1843 he started a magazine, the _Pioneer_, which
only reached its third number, though it counted among its contributors
Hawthorne, Poe, Whittier, and Miss Barrett (afterward Mrs. Browning).
A second volume of poems, printed in 1844, showed a distinct advance,
in such {496} pieces as the _Shepherd of King Admetus_, _Rhoecus_, a
classical myth, told in excellent blank verse, and the same in subject
with one of Landor's polished intaglios; and the _Legend of Britanny_,
a narrative poem, which had fine passages, but no firmness in the
management of the story. As yet, it was evident, the young poet had
not found his theme. This came with the outbreak of the Mexican War,
which was unpopular in New England, and which the Free Soil party
regarded as a slaveholders' war waged without provocation against a
sister republic, and simply for the purpose of extending the area of
slavery.

In 1846, accordingly, the _Biglow Papers_ began to appear in the
_Boston Courier_, and were collected and published in book form in
1848. These were a series of rhymed satires upon the government and
the war party, written in the Yankee dialect, and supposed to be the
work of Hosea Biglow, a home-spun genius in a down-east country town,
whose letters to the editor were indorsed and accompanied by the
comments of the Rev. Homer Wilbur, A.M., pastor of the First Church in
Jaalam, and (prospective) member of many learned societies. The first
paper was a derisive address to a recruiting sergeant, with a
denunciation of the "nigger-drivin' States" and the "northern
dough-faces," a plain hint that the North would do better to secede
than to continue doing dirty work for the South, and an expression of
those universal peace doctrines which were then in the air, and to
which {497} Longfellow gave serious utterance in his _Occultation of
Orion_.

"Ez for war, I call it murder--
There you hev it plain an