Frank Preston Stearns, Cambridge Sketches

[94] years later, they must needs have become antislavery, too. Those of Lowell's friends, like George S. Hillard and George B. Loring, who for social or political reasons took the opposite side, afterwards found themselves left in the lurch by an adverse public opinion.

It was the Mexican war that first aroused Lowell to the seriousness of the extension of slavery, and it was meeting a recruiting officer in the streets of Boston, “covered all over with brass let alone that which nature had sot on his countenance,” which inspired his writing the first of the “Biglow Papers.” They were hastily and carelessly written, and Lowell himself held them in slight estimation as literature; but they became immediately popular, as no poetry had that he had published previously. Their freshness and directness appealed to the manliness and good sense of the average New Englander, and the whole community responded to them with repeated applause. There is, after all, much poetry in the Biglow Papers, the more genuine because unintentional; but they are full of the keenest wit and a proverbial philosophy which, if less profound than Emerson's, is more capable of a practical application.

The vernacular in which they are written must have been learned at Concord,--perhaps on the front stoop of the Middlesex Hotel,while Lowell was listening to the pithy conversation