the hour that is passing. The lives of the
great poets teach us that they were the men of their generation who felt
most deeply the meaning of the present.

HUMOR, WIT, FUN, AND SATIRE

PREFATORY NOTE

In the winter of 1855, when Lowell was thirty-six years old, he gave a
course of twelve lectures before the Lowell Institute in Boston. His
subject was the English Poets, and the special topics of the successive
lectures were: 1, "Poetry, and the Poetic Sentiment," illustrating the
imaginative faculty; 2, "Piers Ploughman's Vision," as the first
characteristically English poem; 3, "The Metrical Romances," marking the
advent into our poetry of the sense of Beauty; 4, "The Ballads,"
especially as models of narrative diction; 5, Chaucer, as the poet of
real life--the poet outside of nature; 6, Spenser, as the representative
of the purely poetical; 7, Milton, as representing the imaginative; 8,
Butler, as the wit; 9, Pope, as the poet of artificial life; 10, "On
Poetic Diction"; 11, Wordsworth, as representing the egotistic
imaginative, or the poet feeling himself in nature; 12, "On the Function
and Prospects of Poetry."

These lectures were written rapidly, many of them during the period of
delivery of the course; they bore marks of hastiness of composition, but
they came from a full and rich mind, and they were the issues of
familiar studies and long reflection. No such criticism, at once
abundant in knowledge and in sympathetic insight, and distinguished by
breadth of view, as well as by fluency, grace, and power of style, had
been heard in America. They were listened to by large and enthusiastic
audiences, and they did much to establish Lowell's position as the
ablest of living critics of poetry, and, in many respects, as the
foremost of American men of letters.

In the same year he was made Professor of Belles-Lettres in Harvard
University, and after spending somewhat more than a year in Europe, in
special preparation, he entered in the autumn of 1856 upon the duties of
the chair, which he continued to occupy till 1877, when he was appointed
Minister of the United States to Spain.

During the years of his professorship he delivered numerous courses of
lectures to his classes. Few of them were written out, but they were
given more or less extemporaneously from full notes. The subject of
these courses was in general the "Study of Literature," treating in
different years of different special topics, from the