Thomas Wentworth Higginson, The new world and the new book

[100] read the latter of these two poems, though he is still permitted to add the former. From the moment when Lowell read his ‘Commemoration Ode’ at Cambridge, that great poem took for him the same position; while out of any hundred critics ninety-nine would place the ‘Day in June’ as the best of his shorter passages, and the ‘Bigelow Papers,’ of course, stand collectively for his humor. Emerson's ‘The Problem’—containing the only verses by a living author hung up for contemplation in Westminster Abbey—still stands as the highwater mark of his genius, although possibly, so great is the advantage possessed by a shorter poem, it may be superseded at last by his ‘Daughters of Time.’ No one doubts that Bayard Taylor will go down to fame, if at all, by his brief ‘Legend of Balaklava,’ and Julia Ward Howe by her ‘Battle Hymn of the Republic.’ It is, perhaps, characteristic of the even and well-distributed muse of Whittier that it is less easy to select his high-water mark; but perhaps ‘My Playmate’ comes as near to it as anything. Bryant's ‘Waterfowl’ is easily selected, and so is Longfellow's ‘Wreck of the ’