he, I du like a feller that ain't a Feared.

I have intusspussed a Few refleckshuns

hear and thair. We're kind o' prest with Hayin.

Ewers respecfly
HOSEA BIGLOW."

13. shappoes-chapeaux, cocked hats. ¶ 4. insines=ensigns. ¶ 8. the Cornwallis: "A sort of muster in masquerade; supposed to have had its origin soon after the Revolution, and to commemorate the surrender of Lord Cornwallis."-Lowell. "i hait the Site of a feller with a muskit as I du pizn But their is fun to a cornwallis I aint agoin' to deny it.-H. B." ¶9. I wish thet I wuz furder: "he means Not quite so fur I guess.-H. B."

(399) 11. slarterin' =slaughtering. ¶ 24. Caleb:

=

General Caleb Cushing.

¶ 26. folly follow. 29. Funnel: Faneuil Hall, in Boston. ¶30. Bolles: John A. Bolles, Massachusetts secretary of state, 1843-44. Cunnle=colonel. ¶31. Secondary: "the ignerant creeter means Sekketary; but he ollers stuck to his books like cobbler's wax to an ile-stone.-H. B." ¶ 33. Rantoul: Robert Rantoul, a prominent Boston lawyer, and a leader of the Jackson Democrats; as a member of the Massachusetts legislature he prepared a report advocating the abolition of the death penalty. 36. lights bowels. 39. saxons=sextons. ¶ 50. "it must be aloud that thare's a streak o' nater in lovin' sho, but it sartinly is 1 of the curusest things in nater to see a rispecktable dri goods dealer (deekon off a chutch mayby) a riggin' himself out in the Weigh they du and struttin' round in the Reign aspilin' his trowsis and makin' wet goods of himself. Ef any thin's foolisher and moor dicklus than militerry gloary it is milishy gloary.-H. B."

=

I

(400) 52. Saltillo: the capital of one of the Mexican states. Salt-river: "An imaginary river, up which defeated politicians and political parties are supposed to be sent to oblivion."-The Century Dictionary. The term is supposed to be derived from a small river in Kentucky full of windings and shallows. It seems to be used here in the sense of something wholly imaginary, a hoax, like the Mexico of Sawin's dreams. ¶ 57. wopper = whopper, a big lie. ¶ 58. chapparal=a thorny thicket. ¶ 60. "these fellers are verry proppilly called Rank Heroes [rancheros, ranchmen], and the more tha kill the ranker and more Herowick tha bekum.-H. B." ¶ 62. scarabæus pilularius: "it wuz 'tumblebug' as he Writ it, but the parson put the Latten instid. i sed tother maid better meeter, but he said tha was eddykated peepl to Boston and tha wouldn't stan' it no how. idnow as tha wood and idnow as tha wood.-H. B." ¶74. human beans: "he means human beins, that's wut he means. i spose he kinder thought tha wuz human beans ware the Xisle [exile] Poles comes from.-H. B." ¶ 85. Jackson: Andrew Jackson had died two years before but his spirit might be supposed to be leading the Democratic party still-or perhaps Mr. Sawin did not know that he was dead.

(401) 110. nipper = dram, drink. ¶ 114. linkum vity=lignum-vitae, a very hard wood, sometimes hickory; Sawin means that he would use a hickery cudgel. (401) AN INDIAN-SUMMER REVERIE. The scene of the poem is Cambridge, Mass., the poet's birthplace and his residence for the greater part of his life.

(407) 209. the Muses' factories: the buildings of Harvard University. ¶ 221. Cobtic=Egyptian. ¶223. Allston: Washington Allston, the American painter

and poet, who spent the last years of his life in Cambridge, dying there in 1843. ¶ 225. Virgilium vidi tantum "Virgil I have only seen."

=

227. Undine-like: Undine was a water-spirit, and her name (from Latin "unda," "wave") suggests the undulatory, tremulous movements of water.

(408) 236. fire-new mediavals: new buildings in medieval style; cf. 11. 218-21. 237. chestnut tree: this is the same tree that Longfellow refers to in "The Village Blacksmith"; it was cut down in 1876. ¶ 239-46. Cf. "The Village Blacksmith,' II. 19-24 (p. 236). 255. Paul Potter: a Dutch painter (1625-54). ¶ 263. ribboned parchments three: from a school, Harvard College, and the Harvard Law School. ¶ 264. collegisse juvat="it pleases me to have gone to college." ¶ 26780. The lines allude to the recent death of Lowell's first child, in her second year. (409) A FABLE FOR CRITICS. Line 1486--1532. 14. Graylock: a mountain in Massachusetts.

(410) THE VISION OF SIR LAUNFAL. "According to the mythology of the Romancers, the San Greal, or Holy Grail, was the cup out of which Jesus partook of the last supper with his disciples. It was brought into England by Joseph of Arimathea, and remained there, an object of pilgrimage and adoration, for many years in the keeping of his lineal descendants. It was incumbent upon those who had charge of it to be chaste in thought, word, and deed; but one of the keepers having broken this condition, the Holy Grail disappeared. From that time it was a favorite enterprise of the knights of Arthur's court to go in search of it. Sir Galahad was at last successful in finding it, as may be read in the seventeenth book of the Romance of King Arthur [Malory's Morte Darthur]. Tennyson has made Sir Galahad the subject of one of the most exquisite of his poems. The plot (if I may give that name to anything so slight) of the foregoing poem is my own; and to serve its purposes I have enlarged the circle of competition in search of the miraculous cup in such a manner as to include, not only other persons than the heroes of the Round Table, but also a period of time subsequent to the date of King Arthur's reign."-Lowell's note at the end of the poem in the 1848 edition. The poem of Tennyson's to which Lowell refers is the lyric, "Sir Galahad"; the idyll, "The Holy Grail," had not yet been written. 19, 10. Cf. Wordsworth's "Intimations of Immortality," 1. 66, "Heaven lies about us in our infancy."

(411) 17, 18. druid wood . . . . benedicile: the Druids were priests of the ancient Celtic peoples, and their place of worship was often under an oak or in a grove.

(418) 307. Beautiful Gate: "And a certain man lame from his mother's womb was carried, whom they laid daily at the gate of the temple which is called Beautiful, to ask alms of them that entered into the temple."-Acts 3:2. 1308. Himself the Gate: "I am the door: by me if any man enter in, he shall be saved."-John 10:9. 315. "But he saith unto them, It is I; be not afraid."-John 6:20.

(419) BEAVER BROOK. First published in The Anti-Slavery Standard, January 4, 1849.

(420) 21. Undine: a water-spirit, in a story of that name, by the German author Fouqué, published in 1811.

(421) THE WASHERS OF THE SHROUD. First published in The Atlantic Monthly November, 1861, from which the text is here taken. 10. Odin's hounds: Odin was

thought of, in northern mythology, as god of the wind, who hunted in tempests, accompanied by two wolves, or hounds. ¶ 16. the ancient Three: the Fates. ¶ 18. the mystic Tree: "The mighty ash-tree, Ygdrasill, was supposed to support the whole universe. It . . . had three immense roots, extending one into Asgard (the dwelling of the gods), the other into Jotunheim (the abode of the giants), and the third to Niffleheim (the regions of darkness and cold). By the side of each of these roots is a spring, from which it is watered. The root that extends into Asgard is carefully tended by the three Norns, goddesses who are regarded as the dispensers of fate. They are Urdur (the past), Verdandi (the present), Skuld (the future).”Bulfinch, The Age of Fable.

(422) Thor's: Thor, eldest son of Odin, was god of thunder; he had a hammer which he wielded with tremendous might. ¶ 40. Hesper: Hesperus, as the evening star, has often been used in poetry for the Western world, or, as here, for the greatest nation there. ¶ 56-58. Cf. Tennyson's "Enone" (1832, 1842), ll. 142, 143:

Self-reverence, self-knowledge, self-control,
These three alone lead life to sovereign power.

¶ 62. Denounce = announce.

(423) 66, 67. The eagle, the emblem of the United States, was also, in classic mythology, the bird sacred to Jove and bore his thunderbolts.

(424) THE COURTIN'. "The only attempt I had ever made at anything like a pastoral (if that may be called an attempt which was the result almost of pure accident) was in 'The Courtin'.' While the introduction to the First Series [of Biglow Papers] was going through the press, I received word from the printer that there was a blank page left which must be filled. I sat down at once and improvised another fictitious 'notice of the press,' in which, because verse would fill up space more cheaply than prose, I inserted an extract from a supposed ballad of Mr. Biglow. I kept no copy of it, and the printer, as directed, cut it off when the gap was filled. Presently I began to receive letters asking for the rest of it, sometimes for the balance of it. I had none; but to answer such demands I patched a conclusion upon it in a later edition. Those who had only the first continued to importune me. Afterward, being asked to write it out as an autograph for the Baltimore Sanitary Commission Fair, I added other verses, into some of which I infused a little more sentiment in a homely way, and after a fashion completed it by sketching in the characters and making a connected story. Most likely I have spoiled it, but I shall put it at the end of this Introduction, to answer once for all those kindly importunings."-Introduction to The Biglow Papers, Second Series, 1866 edition.

(427) ODE RECITED AT THE HARVARD COMMEMORATION. Published in The Atlantic Monthly, September, 1865, from which the text is here taken; a comparison with the later text will show significant changes. On July 21, 1865, exercises were held at Harvard College in memory of the ninety-three sons of Harvard who had died as Union soldiers in the Civil War; Lowell read this poem, which produced a powerful impression. 11. feathered words: cf. "Weak-winged" (l. 1) and Homer's frequent phrase," winged words."

(428) 35, 36. Harvard College was founded in 1636, when Cambridge was little more than a clearing in the woods. 37. Veritas: "On the 27th of December,

1643, a College seal was adopted, having, as at present, three open books on the field of an heraldic shield, with the motto 'Veritas' inscribed. The books were probably intended to represent the Bible."-Josiah Quincy, The History of Harvard University, Vol. I, p. 48.

(429) 74, 75.

Cf. Shelley's "Hymn to Intellectual Beauty," ll. 29-31:

Frail spells, whose uttered charm might not avail to sever,
From all we hear and all we see,

Doubt, chance, and mutability.

184. Cf. Macbeth, V. v. 24-26:

Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player

That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more.

88-104. Cf. Wordsworth's "Intimations of Immortality," ll. 146-63:

High instincts before which our mortal nature
Did tremble like a guilty thing surprised;
But for those first affections,

Those shadowy recollections,
Which, be they what they may,

Are yet the fountain-light of all our day,

Are yet a master-light of all our seeing,

Uphold us, cherish, and have power to make

Our noisy years seem moments in the being

Of the Eternal Silence; truths that wake,
To perish never,

Which neither listlessness, nor mad endeavour,
Nor man nor boy,

Nor all that is at enmity with joy,

Can utterly abolish or destroy.

Hence, in a season of calm weather,

Though inland far we be,

Our souls have sight of that immortal sea
Which brought us hither.

105. Whither: i.e., by what route.

(430) 115. Cf. Milton's sonnet, "To the Lord General Cromwell," ll. 10, 11:

Peace hath her victories

No less renowned than War.

¶ 119-22. See I Kings 19:6, and Isa. 6:6. ¶ 147-91. The portrait of Lincoln in these lines may be compared with the following passages from an article by Lowell in The North American Review, January, 1864: "The hereditary ruler in any critical emergency may reckon on the inexhaustible resources of prestige, of sentiment, of superstition, of dependent interest, while the new man must slowly and painfully create all these out of the unwilling material around him, by superiority of character, by patient singleness of purpose, by sagacious presentiment of popular tendencies and instinctive sympathy with the national character. Mr. Lincoln's task was one of peculiar and exceptional difficulty... . ... Never did a President enter upon office with less means at his command, outside his own strength of heart and steadiness of understanding, for inspiring confidence in the people, and so

30

winning it for himself, than Mr. Lincoln. All that was known of him was that he
was a good stump-speaker, nominated for his availability—that is, because he had no
history, and chosen by a party with whose more extreme opinions he was not in
sympathy. . . . . All that he did was sure to be virulently attacked as ultra by one
side; all that he left undone, to be stigmatized as proof of lukewarmness and back-
sliding by the other. Meanwhile he was to carry on a truly colossal war by means
of both; he was to disengage the country from diplomatic entanglements of unprece-
dented peril undisturbed by the help or the hinderance of either, and to win from the
crowning dangers of his administration, in the confidence of the people, the means of
his safety and their own. He has contrived to do it, and perhaps none of our Presi-
dents since Washington has stood so firm in the confidence of the people as he does
after three years of stormy administration. Mr. Lincoln's policy was a tentative
one, and rightly so. He laid down no programme which must compel him to be
either inconsistent or unwise, no cast-iron theorem to which circumstances must be
fitted as they rose or else be useless to his ends. He seemed to have chosen Mazarin's
motto, Le temps et moi. The moi, to be sure, was not very prominent at first; but
it has grown more and more so, till the world is beginning to be persuaded that it
stands for a character of marked individuality and capacity for affairs. Time was
his prime-minister, and, we began to think, at one period, his general-in-chief also.
At first he was so slow that he tired out all those who see no evidence of progress
but in blowing up the engine; then he was so fast that he took the breath away
from those who think there is no getting on safely while there is a spark of fire under
the boilers. God is the only being who has time enough; but a prudent man, who
knows how to seize occasion, can commonly make a shift to find as much as he
needs. Mr. Lincoln, as it seems to us in reviewing his career, though we have
sometimes in our impatience thought otherwise, has always waited, as a wise man
should, till the right moment brought up all his reserves. Semper nocuit differre
paratis is a sound axiom; but the really efficacious man will also be sure to know
when he is not ready, and be firm against all persuasion and reproach till he is.
True, there is a popular image of an impossible He, in whose plastic hands the
submissive destinies of mankind become as wax, and to whose commanding neces-
sity the toughest facts yield with the graceful pliancy of fiction; but in real life we
commonly find that the men who control circumstances, as it is called, are those
who have learned to allow for the influence of their eddies, and have the nerve to
turn them to account at the happy instant. Mr. Lincoln's perilous task has been to
carry a rather shackly raft through the rapids, making fast the unrulier logs as he
could snatch opportunity, and the country is to be congratulated that he did not
think it his duty to run straight at all hazards, but cautiously to assure himself with
his sting-pole where the main current was and keep steadily to that. He is still
in wild water, but we have faith that his skill and sureness of eye will bring him
out right at last. . . . . Mr. Lincoln dallied with his decision [about emancipation]
perhaps longer than seemed needful to those on whom its awful responsibility was
not to rest; but when he made it, it was worthy of his cautious but sure-footed
understanding."

(431) 160. West: i.e., the Occident, the New World.

(433) 243, 244. See Num. 13. 245. Cf. Gray's "Elegy Written in a Country