Essays," published in the year of his death in 1891. My sincere hope is that this book will not be found to be an unworthy successor to these volumes.

Though some of Lowell's literary opinions are old-fashioned to us (one author even wrote an entire volume to demolish Lowell's reputation as a critic), there is much in his work that the world will not let die. He is highly regarded abroad, and he is one of the few men in our literature who produced creative criticism.

Thanks and acknowledgments are due the Century Magazine and the literary representatives of Lowell, for permission to reprint in this volume the first five essays, which are copyrighted and were published in the Century Magazine.

ALBERT MORDELL

Philadelphia, January 13, 1920

CONTENTS

ON POETRY AND BELLES-LETTRES

THE FUNCTION OF THE POET
  With note by Charles Eliot Norton.
  Century Magazine, January, 1894

HUMOR, WIT, FUN, AND SATIRE
  With note by Charles Eliot Norton.
  Century Magazine, November, 1893

THE FIVE INDISPENSABLE AUTHORS (HOMER, DANTE, CERVANTES, GOETHE, SHAKESPEARE) Century Magazine, December, 1893

THE IMAGINATION
  Century Magazine, March, 1894

CRITICAL FRAGMENTS
  Century Magazine, May, 1894
    I. Life in Literature and Language
    II. Style and Manner
    III. Kalevala

REVIEWS OF CONTEMPORARIES

HENRY JAMES: JAMES'S TALES AND SKETCHES
  The Nation, June 24, 1875

LONGFELLOW: THE COURTSHIP OF MILES STANDISH
  Atlantic Monthly, January, 1859

TALES OF A WAYSIDE INN
  North American Review, January, 1864

WHITTIER: IN WAR TIME, AND OTHER POEMS
  North American Review, January, 1864

HOME BALLADS AND POEMS
  Atlantic Monthly, November, 1860

SNOW-BOUND: A WINTER IDYL
  North American Review, April, 1866

POETRY AND NATIONALITY
  North American Review, October, 1868

W.D. HOWELLS: VENETIAN LIFE
  North American Review, October, 1866

EDGAR A. POE
  Graham's Magazine, February, 1845;
  R.W. Griswold's edition of Poe's Works (1850)

THACKERAY: ROUNDABOUT PAPERS
  North American Review, April, 1864

TWO GREAT AUTHORS

SWIFT: FORSTER'S LIFE OF SWIFT
  The Nation, April 13 and 20, 1876

PLUTARCH'S MORALS
  North American Review, April, 1871

A PLEA FOR FREEDOM FROM SPEECH AND FIGURES OF SPEECH-MAKERS
  Atlantic Monthly, December, 1860

ON POETRY AND BELLES-LETTRES

THE FUNCTION OF THE POET

This was the concluding lecture in the course which Lowell read before the Lowell Institute in the winter of 1855. Doubtless Lowell never printed it because, as his genius matured, he felt that its assertions were too absolute, and that its style bore too many marks of haste in composition, and was too rhetorical for an essay to be read in print. How rapid was the growth of his intellectual judgment, and the broadening of his imaginative view, may be seen by comparing it with his essays on Swinburne, on Percival, and on Rousseau, published in 1866 and 1867—essays in which the topics of this lecture were touched upon anew, though not treated at large.

But the spirit of this lecture is so fine, its tone so full of the enthusiasm of youth, its conception of the poet so lofty, and the truths it contains so important, that it may well be prized as the expression of a genius which, if not yet mature, is already powerful, and aquiline alike in vision and in sweep of wing. It is not unworthy to stand with Sidney's and with Shelley's "Defence of Poesy," and it is fitted to warm and inspire the poetic heart of the youth of this generation, no less than of that to which it was first addressed. As a close to the lecture Lowell read his beautiful (then unpublished) poem "To the Muse."

Charles Eliot Norton

* * * * *

Whether, as some philosophers assume, we possess only the fragments of a great cycle of knowledge in whose centre stood the primeval man in friendly relation with the powers of the universe, and build our hovels out of the ruins of our ancestral palace; or whether, according to the development theory of others, we are rising gradually, and have come up out of an atom instead of descending from an Adam, so that the proudest pedigree might run up to a barnacle or a zoophyte at last, are questions that will keep for a good many centuries yet. Confining myself to what little we can learn from history, we find tribes rising slowly out of barbarism to a higher or lower point of culture and civility, and everywhere the poet also is found, under one name or other, changing in certain outward respects, but essentially the same.

And however far we go back, we shall find this also—that the poet and the priest were united originally in the same person; which means that the poet was he who was conscious of the world of spirit as well as that of sense, and was the ambassador of the gods to men. This was his highest function, and hence his name of "seer." He was the discoverer and declarer of the perennial beneath the deciduous. His were the epea pteroenta, the true "winged words" that could fly down the unexplored future and carry the names of ancestral heroes, of the brave and wise and good. It was thus that the poet could reward virtue, and, by and by, as society grew more complex, could burn in the brand of shame. This is Homer's character of Demodocus, in the eighth book of the "Odyssey," "whom the Muse loved and gave the good and ill"—the gift of conferring good or evil immortality. The first histories were in verse; and sung as they were at feasts and gatherings of the people, they awoke in men the desire of fame, which is the first promoter of courage and self-trust, because it teaches men by degrees to appeal from the present to the future. We may fancy what the influence of the early epics was when they were recited to men who claimed the heroes celebrated in them for their ancestors, by what Bouchardon, the sculptor, said, only two centuries ago: "When I read Homer, I feel as if I were twenty feet high." Nor have poets lost their power over the future in modern times. Dante lifts up by the hair the face of some petty traitor, the Smith or Brown of some provincial Italian town, lets the fire of his Inferno glare upon it for a moment, and it is printed forever on the memory of mankind. The historians may iron out the shoulders of Richard the Third as smooth as they can, they will never get over the wrench that Shakespeare gave them.

The peculiarity of almost all early literature is that it seems to have a double meaning, that, underneath its natural, we find ourselves continually seeing or suspecting a supernatural meaning. In the older epics the characters seem to be half typical and only half historical. Thus did the early poets endeavor to make realities out of appearances; for, except a few typical men in whom certain ideas get embodied, the generations of mankind are mere apparitions who come out of the dark for a