But Lowell's humor was the chrism, snatching together parallels whose
apparent inequalities, yet real justice, were powerfully convincing. He
never sought the inconsistencies of his subject, they flocked to meet
him uninvited. And his infinite cheerfulness, his freedom, even in his
most daring onslaughts, from ill-nature, these were the influences meet,
'That bowed our hearts like barley bending.'
Scarcely did we know our knight in his new armor. Off with the hauberk
and visor, down with the glittering shield of his mediaeval crusade, and,
lo! with his hand on the plow and his eyes on the fair fields of his own
New England, our country boy sings his _Ave Aquila!_ while other men are
rubbing the sunbeams of of the new-born day into their sleepy eyes.
And it was not alone in our own country that this newly developed phase
of our poet's genius was acknowledged and applauded. Says a British
Review, with an admiration whose reservations are unfortunately too just
to be disputed: 'All at once we have a batch of small satirists,--Mr.
Bailey at their head,--in England, and one really powerful satirist in
America, namely, Mr. J.R. Lowell, whose "Biglow Papers" we most gladly
welcome as being not only the best volume of satires since the
Anti-Jacobin, but also the first work of real and efficient poetical
genius which has reached us from the United States.
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