430 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 



he was appointed by President Hayes Minister to the Court of 

 Spain. 



These twenty years, from 1857 to 1877 were the most productive 

 period of Lowell's literary activity. He was in the maturity of his 

 mental power, he held a convenient position in University life, his 

 home relations were congenial and stimulating, and his collegiate 

 work as well as his editorial charge successively of the Atlantic 

 and North American gave him a needed impulse to literary effort. 

 During this period appeared the most of that body of literary history 

 and criticism which marks him as the most distinguished of American 

 critics. Brought together in his writings under the general head of 

 " Literary Essays," these papers are the rich deposit of a mind at once 

 sympathetic and discriminating, capable of enjoying to the full the 

 varied manifestations of life in literature, and yet an intuitive judge 

 and penetrating critic. 



While this broad stream of literary criticism was flowing, there 

 was another expression of Lowell's nature, never divorced from this 

 love of letters, — a criticism of life, especially as it took form in con- 

 temporaneous American history. The period which I have named 

 covered the preparation for the war for the Union, that war itself, 

 and the reconstruction era afterward, and the expression of Lowell's 

 nature in its attitude toward the whole period was manifold. The 

 volume of " Political Essays" contains the incisive papers which stung 

 the irresolute and time-serving, and inspirited the ardent lovers of 

 truth and liberty. It is impossible to read these papers now without 

 admiration for the political sagacity of the writer, — a sagacity before 

 the event, not after. Every page bears witness to the sanity with 

 which he regarded contemporaneous affairs, when madness seemed 

 the most natural temper in the world, and his insight of human nature 

 was that of a poet who did not regard his power of vision as exclud- 

 ing the necessity of paying taxes. History has been supplying foot- 

 notes to these pages, with the result, not of correcting the text, but of 

 confirming it. 



In this same period also he wrote and published the Second Series 

 of the Biglow Papers, and used his satire and his moral indignation 

 with a depth of feeling which surpassed that shown in the first series, 

 a little to the detriment thereby, it may be, of the brilliancy of the 

 general effect. In truth, strong as was Lowell's power of invective, 

 his passion of patriotism found this vent too narrow ; there was a 

 large, constructive imagination at work on the great theme of national 

 life, which found fuller expression in the Odes which the Centennial 



