e eminence among American authors. His genius
was undoubtedly embarrassed by the diffusive tendency of his
interests. He might have been a greater poet had he been less the
reformer and statesman, and his creative impulses were often absorbed
in the mere enjoyment of exercising his critical faculty. Although he
achieved only a qualified eminence as poet, or as prose writer, yet
because of the breadth and variety of his permanent achievement he
must be regarded as our greatest man of letters. His sympathetic
interest, always outflowing toward concrete humanity, was a quality--

"With such large range as from the ale-house bench
Can reach the stars and be with both at home."

With marvelous versatility and equal ease he could talk with the
down-east farmer and salty seamen and exchange elegant compliments
with old world royalty. In _The Cathedral_ he says significantly:

"I thank benignant nature most for this,--
A force of sympathy, or call it lack
Of character firm-planted, loosing me
From the pent chamber of habitual self
To dwell enlarged in alien modes of thought,
Haply distasteful, wholesomer for that,
And through imagination to possess,
As they were mine, the lives of other men."

In the delightful little poem, _The Nightingale in the Study_, we have
a fanciful expression of the conflict between Lowell's love of books
and love of nature. His friend the catbird calls him "out beneath the
unmastered sky," where the buttercups "brim with wine beyond all
Lesbian juice." But there are ampler skies, he answers, "in Fancy's
land," and the singers though dead so long--

"Give its best sweetness to all song.
To nature's self her better glory."

His love of reading is manifest in all his work, giving to his style a
bookishness that is sometimes excessive and often troublesome. His
expression, though generally direct and clear, and happily colored by
personal frankness, is often burdened with learning. To be able to
read his essays with full appreciation is in itself evidence of a
liberal education. His scholarship was broad and profound, but it was
not scholarship in the German sense, exhaustive and exhausting. He
studied for the joy of knowing, never for the purpose of being known,
and he cared more to know the spirit and meaning of things than to
know their causes and origins. A language he learned for the sake of
its literature rather than its philology. As Mr. Brow