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essentially observer and artist, and incapable of partisanship." ("Among My Books," p. 152.) We italicize the last three words, that their true implication may not escape the reader. They mean that Shakespeare, in Mr. Lowell's opinion, was incapable of taking sides between virtue and vice. This is not said of Shakespeare as if it were a ghastly defect in his character. It is rather said as entirely homogeneous with the unmixed and unqualified eulogy of Shakespeare, which is the motive and material of the essay. On the next page Mr. Lowell holds this language: "the equilibrium of his judgment, essential to him as an artist, but equally removed from propagandism, whether as enthusiast or logician, would have unfitted him for the pulpit." That is, Shakespeare's judgment was so perfect that he had no 'earnest convictions! ' That is, the rights of good and the rights of evil in the world are so nicely balanced that equilibrium of judg ment, when it becomes Shakespearean, can find no difference in favor of the one or of the other! That is, it was some defect of 'judgment' that made Jesus a 'propagandist' of virtue! That is, Paul could never have been the apostle that he was, if he had been equal to Shakespeare in 'judgment ! ' And such superhuman, with no hyperbole we may say, such supradivine, 'equilibrium of judgment in Shakespeare, essential to him as an artist,' is no bar to Mr. Lowell's rating the character above the genius of the man that possessed it!

We have not the heart to insist here upon the prodigious inconsistency between the above-quoted expressions of Mr. Lowell and that nobler sentiment of his respecting the necessity to good literature of earnest convictions. We are too much occupied with indignant literary chagrin and shame, that a man, native to

everything severe and high in moral inspiration to intellectual achievement, should have been so enchanted out of his birthright by the evil charm of the charmer. We speak, in speaking thus, not on behalf of morals, but on behalf of literature. It is indeed the fact that inconsistencies and self-contradictions like those which abound in Mr. Lowell's work are probably traceable at last to some defective reverence in the author for the sacred rights of truth. Still it is not to be said that Mr. Lowell is immoral, or that he teaches immorality, in his writings. But he escapes being immoral, and he escapes teaching immorality, in his writings, if the paradox will be allowed, by the happy insincerity with which he holds and applies his own adopted canons of taste. By a fine revenge of the violated truth he does not however thus escape vital harm to the artistic value of his literary work from the infection of false principles in literary art. Nor does he--we must be so far true to ourselves-nor does he, we think, escape exerting such an influence in favor of the Goethean principles of æsthetics as is sure, however remotely, to have also its sequel of moral bale to those younger writers among his countrymen, who look to him as to their master. Alas, alas, say we, that no literary Luther was found betimes, to grapple the beautiful and climbing, yet leaning, spirit of the youthful Lowell as a literary Melancthon, strongly and safely to himself. How much might there not then have been saved to American literature-how much not to a fair, but half-defeated,. personal fame! In default of an original and independent endowment of impelling and steadying force in himself, such as a high conscious and determinate moral purpose would have supplied, the friendly attraction of some dominant intellect and conscience near, different from Emerson's, and better suited to Mr.

Lowell's individual needs, seems the one thing wanting to have reduced the graceful eccentricities of his movement to an orderly orbit, and to have set him permanently in a sphere of his own, exalted, if not the most exalted, among the stars of the "clear upper sky."

Not prose, however, but verse, is Mr. Lowell's truc literary vernacular. He writes, as Milton wrote, with his left hand, in writing prose. But whether in prosc or in verse, it is still almost solely by genius and acquirement quite apart from the long labor of art, and of course, therefore, apart from the exercised strength and skill of that discipline to art, which is the wages of long labor alone, that he produces his final results. He thus chooses his place in the Valhalla of letters among the many "inheritors of unfulfilled renown." It seems likely at least (but he is yet in his just mellowing prime, and Apollo avert the omen!) that his name is destined to be treasured in the history of American literature chiefly as a gracious tradition of personal character universally dear, of culture only second to the genius which it adorned, of fame constantly greater than the achievements to which it appealed.

MR. BRYANT'S POETRY.

IT is now,' we believe, about the space of a generation

since the American public first learned to associate the name of William Cullen Bryant with the "Evening Post" newspaper. During this unusually protracted term of editorial service, Mr. Bryant has taken frequent recesses from the exhausting demands of his profession. The intervals of leisure thus intercalated in a life otherwise laboriously occupied he has employed variously— in the main, however, dividing them between travel and foreign residence. More lately a country-seat on Long Island, beautiful by nature and beautiful by art, has drawn him with the lure of leisure and letters.

But within the year past, the newspapers tell us, Mr. Bryant has once more returned to do task-work as editor. Remembering that his age, though hale and vigorous still, is now advanced to "reverence and the silver hair," and recalling the fact that for the last decade and longer his muse has but seldom broken the silence, the very sweetness, too, of these occasional utterances having to our fancy something of a certain rare and costly quality going to confirm the omen,-we are forced to regard this step as an unwelcome reminder that our favorite American poet has probably

1 The author has thought it not worth while to obliterate the marks of time which will here, as occasionally elsewhere, meet the observation of the reader.

It will

accomplished his important poetical labors. not therefore be judged premature if we herewith attempt, what has thus far, and properly, remained unattempted, something like a general and exhaustive survey of his genius and achievements. We shall be confident, at least, that not a line of the thousands which, notwithstanding what we have written, we will hope yet to receive from that honored and practiced hand, could modify our estimate, otherwise than to heighten our praise. And thus we beg to avert the ungracious omen implied in contemplating his poetical career for the moment as closed.

The frequent vicissitudes of labor and recreation with which the actual years of Mr. Bryant's life have been diversified and relieved, are no doubt to be considered as illustrative of his character. It was hardly to be expected that one who, in the flush of early manhood, according to the common tradition of Bryant (which we hope no one will be at the pains to contradict), turned from the profession of law, to which he had been trained, with an instinctive and noble rebellion against what he felt to be its pettinesses and falsities, should, even in the strenuous season of middle age, have so changed that honorable softness of heart as to become unalterably firm to the at least equally rude contacts and collisions of a partisan editorship. We should half have regretted it if he had done so. It would have gone so far toward marring a favorite ideal of ours (perhaps we got it from Coleridge) touching a certain inviolate youthfulness of feeling waiting ever on the nature of the poet, and making to him the freshness and beauty of the world immortal. We trust never to see the fantasy suffer under any such ruthless iconoclasm. Mr. Bryant, indeed, has always, as editor, practiced a skill which his political antagonists have