Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Olde Cambridge

“ [38] effect,” as Holmes says, with the dandelion and the Baltimore oriole “in the tableaux of the old feudal castle.” In even the description of June he finds some of these discords and gives absolute praise only to the description of the brook. His criticism on the measure of the poem is only the natural revolt of what he calls the “old square-toed heroic” against the “rattlety-bang sort of verse” which came in with Coleridge's “Christabel.” All this was, however, written in 1849, and certainly no finer “appreciation” --in the current phrase — of the man Lowell was ever penned than that which Holmes wrote in 1868: “I cannot help, however, saying how much I am impressed by the lusty manhood of your nature as shown in the heroic vigor of your verse; by the reach and compass of your thought; by the affluence, the felicity, and the subtilty of your illustrations, which weave with the thoughts they belong to as golden threads through the tissue of which they form part; and perhaps most of all by that humanity in its larger sense, which belongs to you beyond any of those with whom your name is often joined. While I have been reading these grave and noble poems I ”