position was still a quasi-public one. He continued to be the object of the same sort of honour that had been bestowed upon him in his English ambassadorship. His presence was sought for at every public function where dignified and graceful oratory upon noble themes would attract the public ear; and his words, wherever uttered, commanded the attention of the whole nation. But his constitution, never robust, soon showed signs of its natural frailty. The brightness of his eye, the alertness of his wit, remained the same as ever; but his trembling hand, his failing voice, and the growing transparency of his complexion, all showed clearly to those who loved him that a greater change was fast approaching. He felt, too, the loss of his lifelong friends. He never could pass Longfellow's house, so he used to say (it was near his own), "without a thrill." Emerson, too, was gone, and also Motley. Of his other most intimate friends Holmes and Norton seemed alone to remain. At last, August 12, 1891, the great change came. It took place at Elmwood, the house where he was born; the house that had been his father's, and where his father had lived till 1861; the house where he, too, had lived during all his life except the years that he had spent abroad.

CRITICAL STUDY.

BY HARRIET L. MASON, A.M.,

Professor of English Literature, Drexel Institute, Philadelphia.

LOWELL as a poet does not show that capacity for sustained workmanship necessary to give his verse the highest place among American poets. It has flashes, feeling, purpose, thought-but there is a carelessness about it as a whole that will forever keep it from becoming the best art. It is Lowell as a critic who will be longest remembered. To his work as critical essayist he brought that equipment of scholarship and feeling known as culture, but a culture of the old world engrafted with the motherwit of the new. In the learning of a Macaulay was distilled the humour of New England. So unstinted and omnivorous had been his book-feeding, and so wonderful was his faculty of assimilation, that these essays of Lowell give a harvest of opinions not likely to be regathered. But the toil of such work can hardly be estimated—few can understand what research is represented in one of his pages.

Perhaps the first impression one gets of his prose is that it has remarkable vigour-the glow and enthusiasm

of a scholar-the robustness of a scholar of the new world. This quality is never flagging—even in his very latest prose-so that it is no mere energy of youth, but energy of the individual. This is coupled with a brilliancy so constant as almost to divert the attention from the real soundness underneath. Rare judgments are clothed in such scintillations as:

The Norman conquest was the bridge over which the culture of the continent passed into England."

'Marlowe was the herald who dropped dead in announcing the first fruits of victory."

'The air was heavy with the golden pollen of the Italian renaissance."

His sentences teem with references and allusions to all choice literature. Such a thinker cannot be a writer for dullards; to read him with pleasure is an evidence of a liberal education. Even the sciences are called upon to yield him effective rhetorical figures, as:

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"Enthusiasm sublimates the understanding into imagination." Disintegrate the wine by force of imagination, so as to taste the clustered beauty of the grape-all the sunburnt jollity of the vintage." 'Chaucer had been in his grave 150 years ere England had secreted choice material enough for the making of another poet."

Sometimes the imagery is too dazzling; the illustrations are so numerous as to leave you breathless. The fact that his words suggest so much, together with the fact that one thought leads to another, that to another and so on -until he has strayed into by-paths-makes his style not