O'er the seas and the mountains, the rivers and woods;

He asked not earth's verdict, forgetting the clods,

His soul soared and sang to an audience of gods;

'Twas for them that he measured the thought and the line,

"But now, on the poet's dis-privacied moods

With do this and do that the pert critic intrudes;

While he thinks he's been barely fulfilling his duty

To interpret 'twixt men and their own sense of beauty,

With as glorious a foresight, a balance as

true,

780 As swung out the worlds in the infinite blue; Then a glory and greatness invested man's heart,

The universal, which now stands estranged and apart,

In the free individual molded, was Art; Then the forms of the Artist seemed thrilled with desire

For something as yet unattained, fuller, higher,

As once with her lips, lifted hands, and eyes listening,

And her whole upward soul in her countenance glistening,

Eurydice stood-like a beacon unfired, Which, once touched with flame, will leap

heav'nward inspired

790 And waited with answering kindle to mark The first gleam of Orpheus that pained the red Dark.

Then painting, song, sculpture did more than relieve

The need that men feel to create and believe,

And as, in all beauty, who listens with love Hears these words oft repeated-beyond and above,'

So these seemed to be but the visible sign Of the grasp of the soul after things more divine;

They were ladders the Artist erected to climb

O'er the narrow horizon of space and of time,

800

And we see there the footsteps by which men had gained

To the one rapturous glimpse of the neverattained,

As shepherds could erst sometimes trace in the sod

The last spurning print of a sky-cleaving god.

or pelf,

1 Written early in October, 1861. Lowell wrote to Charles Eliot Norton that he composed it in two days' time, though it had been "in his head" before, in order to get it in the issue of the Atlantic for November. He added: "I owe it to you, for the hint came from one of those books of Souvestre's you lent me-the Breton legends. . . . I began it as a lyric, but it would be too aphoristic for that, and finally flatly refused to sing at any price. So I submitted, took to pentameters, and only hope the thoughts are good enough to be preserved in the ice of the colder and almost glacierslow measure."

This series of Biglow Papers was begun in 1862 and was published as a volume in 1866. The several numbers had been printed in the Atlantic. To the volume Lowell prefixed a long introduction concerning the Yankee dialect, in the course of which he made the following explanation: "The only attempt I had ever made at anything like a pastoral (if that may be called an attempt which was the result almost of pure acciIdent) was in The Courtin'. While the introduction to the First Series was going through the press, I received word from the printer that there was a blank page left which must be filled. I sat down at once and improvised another fictitious 'notice of the press,' in which, because verse would fill up space more cheaply than prose, I inserted an extract from a supposed ballad of Mr. Biglow. I kept no copy of it, and the printer, as directed, cut it off when the gap was filled. Presently I began to receive letters asking for the rest of it. I had none. Afterward, being asked to write it out as an autograph for the Baltimore Sanitary Commission Fair, I added other verses, into some of which I infused a little more sentiment in a homely way, and after a fashion completed it by sketching in the characters and making a connected story. Most likely I have spoiled it, but I shall put it at the end of this Introduction, to answer once for all those kindly importunings."

Seemed warm from floor to ceilin', An' she looked full ez rosy agin Ez the applies she was peelin'.

'T was kin' o' kingdom-come to look On sech a blessed cretur, A dogrose blushin' to a brook

Ain't modester nor sweeter.

He was six foot o' man, A 1,

Clear grit an' human natur'; None could n't quicker pitch a ton Nor dror a furrer straighter.

He'd sparked it with full twenty gals,

Hed squired 'em, danced 'em, druv 'em, Fust this one, an' then thet, by spells

All is, he could n't love 'em.

But long o' her his veins 'ould run

All crinkly like curled maple, The side she breshed felt full o' sun Ez a south slope in Ap'il.

She thought no v'ice hed sech a swing Ez hisn in the choir;

My! when he made Ole Hunderd ring, She knowed the Lord was nigher.

An' she'd blush scarlit, right in prayer,
When her new meetin'-bunnet
Felt somehow thru' its crown a pair
O' blue eyes sot upun it.

Thet night, I tell ye, she looked some! She seemed to 've gut a new soul, For she felt sartin-sure he 'd come, Down to her very shoe-sole.

20

30

NO. VI. SUNTHIN' IN THE PASTORAL LINE

TO THE EDITORS OF THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY

JAALAM, 17th May, 1862.

GENTLEMEN,-At the special request of Mr. Biglow, I intended to enclose, together with his own contribution (into which, at my suggestion, he has thrown a little more of pastoral sentiment than usual), some passages from my sermon on the day of the National Fast, from the text, "Remember them that are in bonds, as bound with them," Hebrews, xiii, 3. But I have not leisure sufficient at present for the copying of them, even were I altogether satisfied with the production as it stands. I should prefer, I confess, to contribute the entire discourse to the pages of your respectable miscellany, if it should be found acceptable upon perusal, especially as I find the difficulty in selection of greater magnitude than I had anticipated. What passes without challenge in the fervor of oral delivery, cannot always stand the colder criticism of the closet. I am not so great an enemy of Eloquence as my friend Mr. Biglow would appear to be from some passages in his contribution for the current month. I would not, indeed, hastily suspect him of covertly glancing at myself in his somewhat caustic animadversions, albeit some of the phrases he girds at are not entire strangers to my lips. I am a more hearty admirer of the Puritans than seems now to be the fashion, and believe, that, if they Hebraized a little too much in their speech, they showed remarkable practical sagacity as statesmen and founders. But such phenomena as Puritanism are the results rather of great religious than of merely social convulsions, and do not long survive them. So soon as an earnest conviction has cooled into a phrase, its work is over, and the best that can be done with it is to bury it. Ite, missa est. I am inclined to agree with Mr. Biglow that we cannot settle the great political questions which are now presenting themselves to the nation by the opinions of Jeremiah or Ezekiel as to the wants and duties of the Jews in their time, nor do I believe that an entire community with their feelings and views would be practicable or even agreeable at the present day. At the same time I could wish that their habit of subordinating the actual to the moral, the flesh to the spirit, and this world to the other, were more common. They had found out, at least, the great military secret that soul weighs more than body.-But I am suddenly called to a sick-bed in the household of a valued parishioner.

With esteem and respect,

Your obedient servant,

HOMER WILBUR.