activity appeared at the end of 1843 in his first series of “Poems.” He married Miss White on December 26, 1844. Immediately afterward, he assumed for a brief space a position in Philadelphia on _The Pennsylvania Freeman_, he and his wife eking out a slender income by writing for The _Broadway Journal_ of New York. An ardent Abolitionist now, Lowell, on his return to Cambridge, gave his attention during the next four years mainly to articles for _The National Anti-Slavery Standard_. From this point it is impossible in so short an account as the present to record many details of his productivity as a writer. In 1846 appeared the first of the “Biglow Papers,” published in _The Boston Courier_; three more came out the next year. In 1848, besides a large sheaf of articles, Lowell issued the second series of his “Poems,” his “Fable for Critics”--in which he handled contemporary American poets with levity but also with insight--and “The Vision of Sir Launfal,” significant titles in any list of his works. His powers were near their height. His humour was almost as sure as it ever became; his criticism almost as pregnant, his imagination as vital, his attitude toward national issues as uncompromising. The defects in his style and treatment are such as we find even in his later work. Until 1853 Lowell’s life was in the main happy, darkened indeed by the death of several children, and by anxiety over the fading health of his wife. From the grief and loneliness following her death, he sought relief in the preparation of a course of lectures on the English poets, to be delivered before the Lowell Institute in Boston. Their signal success brought him a call to the chair left vacant at Harvard by Longfellow. He gave a year or more to study abroad; returning in 1856, he spent the next sixteen years of his life in the duties of a college professor. He lectured on poetry and fine art, and offered courses in German, Spanish, and Italian literature. He was at his best in teaching Dante, where he could put in motion his belief “that the study of imaginative literature tends to sanity of mind”; that it is “a study of order, proportion, arrangement, of the highest and purest Reason,” and shows “that chance has less to do with success than forethought, will, and work.” Latterly he turned his attention to the literature of Old French. For a man who has been taxed with hereditary indolence, his industry was surprising. His connection with _The Atlantic Monthly_ from its launching, in 1857, until 1861, and with _The North American Review_ from 1864 until 1872, is mentioned elsewhere. His private reading was continuous and discursive. With the approach and outbreak of the Civil War, his heart and pen were enlisted in the service of the North. He wrote perhaps the most stirring political articles in American literature; and his verse ran all the way from a new series of “Biglow Papers” to the “Commemoration Ode” recited at the memorial