1850, in the excavations at Kouyunjik, among the ruins of Nineveh, deposited there during the reign of Sardanapalus. Now the cuneiform characters had been a hopeless puzzle to scholars for several hundred years. But a key was at length furnished by Comparative Grammar. Scientific comparison of Sanscrit and its kindred tongues introduced new factors, and applied a new method for the solution of the problem. Enough has been done to guarantee final success; and thus will be made known to the world this providentially-preserved history, ages ago graven, as it were, with a pen of iron, in the rock forever. The value of the whole fund is confirmed by the facts already elicited. Tending, as they do, to establish the general trustworthiness of the much-abused Herodotus, and still more the accuracy of the later Jewish histories, as given in the Old Testament, they take rank among the most interesting results of recent investigation and discovery.

GRANVILLE, O.

WILLIAM A. STEVENS.

IT

T is hard to say how much it is virtue and how much felicity that runs in the blood of some families, to distinguish them with an honorable fame, through various branches and during successive generations. The Lowell, of Massachusetts, enjoy a good civic, and social, and literary renown, which is coeval with the date of the republic, and which constitutes one of the truest, and one of the least alienable, of the treasures of its history. The commonwealth of Massachusetts is rich in the heraldry of such illustrious names; but the commonwealth of Massachusetts has no gentler blood than that which has descended, without taint, from John Lowell, of the days of Washington, to James Russell Lowell, the laureate of Abraham Lincoln. As long as the archives of the Supreme Court of the United States continue to be consulted; as long as cotton is woven in the looms of Lowell, on the banks of the Merrimac; as long as the Lowell Institute of Boston, instructs the American community in religion, science, literature, and the arts, the fame of the Lowells is secure. If these anchors should hereafter drag in the urgent drift of time, then there is that in the volumes now under review, which will still hold against the stress of whatever storm does not overwhelm the language itself in which they are written.

The issue of a new collection of poems by Mr. Lowell, after the lapse of twenty years since the appearance of his previous volumes, is too important an event in the annals of American books not to be signalized by a notice, of respectful dimensions, in every periodical

claiming to be, in any degree, an organ of American literature. It is not without a sense of pain that we welcome this addition to the world's slowly-increasing store of genuine poetry. It is too small an addition to stand for the whole poetical fruitage of such genius as Mr. Lowell's, during twenty such years of his life. Apollo avert the omen, but Mr. Lowell's prime, though vigorous yet, will hardly endure to furnish him a like term of productiveness again. When we consider the "prosperous labor" which Tennyson's thrifty genius has accomplished within the same period, and consider, too, that perhaps the chief difference between Lowell and Tennyson lies, not in their gifts, but in their use of their gifts,—alas, we involuntarily fall to forgetting what Mr. Lowell has done, in vainly guessing and missing the more that he might have done. Sixteen years ago, the editor of Putnam's Monthly, with a natural preference, which possibly the "Fable for Critics," with its dedication, and its genial notice of Harry Franco, may help one understand, expressed to us the opinion that Lowell was a greater poet than Tennyson. We are much inclined ourselves to believe that Tennyson's genius excels chiefly in that which, after all, constitutes the chief excellence of genius,-the faculty of work,-industry. We may do Mr. Lowell wrong in saying this. We must not forget that poetry is the vocation of a lifetime with Tennyson. It is scarcely more than the avocation of a stolen leisure, now and then, with Mr. Lowell. During the greater part of twenty years past, Mr. Lowell has been the incumbent of a laborious professorship at Harvard. More recently, he has been an editor, too. And, especially about the time of the rebellion, his incisive prose invigorated many a page of The Atlantic Monthly with articles, each one of which was as a battle gained for the republic at her utmost need. So, then, with nothing further said that might seem to abate the grace of our greeting, we loyally thank Mr. Lowell for his volume, small as it is. It is precious, nevertheless,—ôléɣov te φίλον τε. We have been querulous like Achilles. It is but fit that we should now be at least as appreciative as he.

This new volume will naturally attract the public attention afresh to its two predecessors of so many years ago. It will be more satisfactory, therefore, to consider the three volumes together, and to review Mr. Lowell's poetry as a whole.

We need not give much space to an examination of that part of his poetry which belongs to the feminine stage of the poet's development. Feminine, we say; and we do not mean effeminate. The earliest poem, in the first collection, is no more effeminate than the latest, in the last. The quality of the strength exhibited does not

seem to be much changed from the one to the other; but the volume of the strength is bravely expanded from the "Threnodia" of the author's youth, to the "Commemoration Ode" of his full maturity. Virility, not perhaps in its most athletic, but certainly in a fine and true meaning of the word, is present in every line that has ever come from Mr. Lowell's pen. A considerable number, however, of the pieces in the first volume are the offspring of a genius manifestly impregnated from the ascendant influence particularly of Tennyson, whose star had already arisen on some foreseeing minds about the time at which Mr. Lowell was an undergraduate at Harvard. These pieces are full of poetry; they even read more smoothly than do many of the later works of the same hand; but they are imitations, and not creations. The "Prometheus," for example, is a monologue, in blank verse, after the manner of Tennyson's "Ulysses." It is a noble poem, but it quite fails of the statuesque perfection of Tennyson's matchless modern antique. The "Prometheus" is Greek in color, although the tone of the color is mixed with a dash of spirit that is not Greek, nor yet Eastern, nor ancient, nor pagan. But this is intentional, and it harmonizes well with the allegorizing use which is made of the myth. The great lack of the poem is in that which should have constituted its chief praise. It lacks in severity and in density. If the idea had been treated with the measure of success of which it was worthy, the literature of this famous personage would have been illustrated with one more poem, not unfit to rank with the few masterpieces, on the same subject, that are destined to be immortal. "St. Simeon Stylites" is suggested by the "Prometheus." The old saint seems, indeed, to be a kind of grotesque ecclesiastic travesty of the mythic pagan hero. It is a coïncidence worthy of note, that Tennyson's volumes, containing the "Ulysses" and "St. Simeon Stylites," were published in England the year before the composition of the "Prometheus," according to the date which Mr. Lowell has himself modestly affixed to his poem. It would be ungracious not to be warned off from very serious criticism of Mr. Lowell's brilliant experiment by a caveat so delicate and indicative of a consciousness so just.

It is curious, by the way, and provocative of exceedingly varied and, as it were, anachronistic reflections, to remember that the "Prometheus" first saw the light in the old Democratic Review of the antediluvian political world. A Democratic Review of now-a-days would hardly be Mr. Lowell's preference, as his medium of communication with the literary public.

Among the other pieces dated by the poet, are various exquisitely

modulated echoes of Tennyson, especially in the Englishman's earlier and more purely sensuous style. But there is one piece among them, echoed, it seems to us, from nowhere, unless from some valley of "rich foreshadowings," secluded within the musing poet's own heart. It is the delicious poem, entitled "My Love." The woman of this piece is so charmingly idealized, in the most modern Christian, or perhaps we should say civilized, spirit, and the stanzas are so interfused with a certain quaint and liquid sweetness of diction and rhythm, flowing around them and between, and floating them, like so many fair islands of Delos, ready to be moored in the reader's memory,—that only with a great effort of self-denial do we refrain from quoting them in full. Happy the lover who has found a love like that which Mr. Lowell first guessed, we suppose, and then put forth, not in vain we believe, to discover!

I love her with a love as still

As a broad river's peaceful might,
Which, by high tower and lowly mill,
Goes wandering at its own will,
And yet doth ever flow aright.

And, on its full, deep breast serene,
Like quiet isles my duties lie;

It flows around them and between,

And makes them fresh, and fair, and green,

Sweet homes wherein to live and die.

Happier still, the sweet seriousness of these exquisite stanzas, amounting to something that is almost more than the natural piety of a poet, does not forbid the suggestion,-happier still, and far more securely happy, the soul whose love of what is at once Human and Divine exercises the wholesome and helpful influence here described.

None but a nature fortunate in a singular manly sweetness, as certainly none but a nature doomed and sealed to poetry, could possibly have conceived, at twenty-one, an ideal so Selene-like of "perfect wifehood and pure lowlihead." "Isabel" is like it, but lacks the warmth and color which, we respectfully venture to guess, something in the poet's heart, yet more ideal than his fancy, imparted to the idyll of Lowell. No wonder that a moral constitution so happily balanced, especially if the balance of it were afterward still further confirmed by the finding of the reality of his beautiful dream,-no wonder that such a moral constitution has preserved Mr. Lowell from soiling his verse with even a dash of that unchaste suggestion, which many recent poets, not pagan by birth, however pagan by sympathy,