tive
Slaves_, have the old Puritan fervor, and such lines as

"They are slaves who dare not be
In the right with two or three,"

and the passage beginning

"Truth forever on the scaffold, Wrong forever on the throne,"

became watchwords in the struggle against slavery and disunion. Some
of these were published in his volume of 1848 and the collected edition
of his poems, in two volumes, issued in 1850. These also included his
most ambitious narrative poem, the _Vision of Sir Launfal_, an
allegorical and spiritual treatment of one of the legends of the Holy
Grail. Lowell's genius was not epical, but lyric and didactic. The
merit of _Sir Launfal_ is not in the telling of the story, but in the
beautiful descriptive episodes, one of which, commencing,

"And what is so rare as a day in June?
Then if ever come perfect days,"

is as current as any thing that he has written. It is significant of
the lack of a natural impulse toward narrative invention in Lowell
that, unlike Longfellow and Holmes, he never tried his hand at a novel.
One of the most important parts of a novelist's equipment he certainly
possesses, namely, an insight into character and an ability to
delineate it. This gift is seen especially in his sketch of Parson
Wilbur, who edited the _Biglow Papers_ with a delightfully pedantic
introduction, glossary, and notes; in the prose essay _On a Certain
Condescension in Foreigners_, and in the uncompleted poem, _Fitz Adam's
Story_. See also the sketch of Captain Underhill in the essay on _New
England Two Centuries Ago_.

The _Biglow Papers_ when brought out in a volume were prefaced by
imaginary notices of the press, including a capital parody of Carlyle,
and a reprint from the "Jaalam Independent Blunderbuss," of the first
sketch--afterward amplified and enriched--of that perfect Yankee idyl,
_The Courtin'_. Between 1862 and 1865 a second series of _Biglow
Papers_ appeared, called out by the events of the civil war. Some of
these, as, for instance, _Jonathan to John_, a remonstrance with
England for her unfriendly attitude toward the North, were not inferior
to any thing in the earlier series; and others were even superior as
poems, equal, indeed, in pathos and intensity to any thing that Lowell
has written in his professedly serious verse. In such passages the
dialect wears rather thin, and there is a certain incongruity between
the rustic spelling and the vivid beauty and power and the f