Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Henry Walcott Boynton, Reader's History of American Literature

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[164] was, for better and worse, more a poet of his own day than Holmes. Even in The vision of Sir Launfal, he could not, as Holmes noted, forget his American landscape or his modern point of view; and his greater successes, from The Bigelow papers to the Commemoration Ode, were essentially poems of occasion.

It was immensely to the advantage of Lowell as a direct human force that he was so frankly a man of the hour. Longfellow in his quiet scholastic life and Holmes in his office of urbane spectator seem a little remote, by comparison, from the more eager questions of their day. Yet Lowell's best work was done in a field of pure letters toward the cultivation of which America had before his time done very little. His criticism of contemporaries cannot, for the most part, be greatly praised. In the period of Lowell's literary bringing — up the traditions of the English Christopher North had reached over to America, and men had learned to measure merit by stings. The Edinburgh Review had set the example, and the Quarterly and Blackwood's magazine had followed it. The recognized way to deal with a literary heretic was to crush