exercises, July 21, 1865, in honour of the Harvard graduates who had given their lives for their country. After the war, _The North American Review_ provided him with an outlet for many of his best known articles in literary criticism, for example, his essays on Chaucer, Pope, Spenser, and Dante. “The Cathedral,” his most notable poem after the “Commemoration Ode,” appeared in 1870. In 1869, and again in 1870, he delivered a number of lectures, on the poets, at Cornell University. In 1872, unable to secure a leave of absence from Harvard, he resigned his position there, in order to go abroad. After a stay of two years in Europe, where he was the recipient of distinguished honours, he resumed his post at Harvard, retaining it until 1877, when President Hayes appointed him Minister to Spain (1877-80). In 1880 Garfield made him Minister to England; here honours were showered upon him. “The Queen is recorded to have said that during her long reign no ambassador or minister had created so much interest and won so much regard as Mr. Lowell.” Shortly after the death of his second wife, in 1885, he was supplanted in his diplomatic post. For a time he lived with his daughter at Southborough, Massachusetts. Among the later collections of his poetry was “Heartsease and Rue,” published in 1887. The last two years of his life were passed at Cambridge, devoted in part to an edition of his works, in ten volumes. After a season of weakness and pain, borne with fortitude and humour, he died, where he first saw the light, at Elmwood, on August 12, 1891. It is well-nigh impossible to characterise Lowell briefly. An attempt to sum up a personality that chose so many avenues of expression, and that at bottom was not thoroughly unified, can hardly do justice to the component parts. The most striking thing about the man was his fertility, if not in great constructive ideas, at all events in separate thoughts. What he writes is full of meat. His redundancy is not in the way of useless verbiage; he wants to use all the materials that offer. A less obvious thing in Lowell is what we may term his lack of complete spiritual organisation. He lived in an age of dissolving beliefs and intellectual unrest. Though he was not tormented, as were some others, by fierce internal doubts, he yet failed ever to be quite clear with himself on fundamental questions of philosophy and religion. He was never quite at one with himself. As a writer, his serious and his humorous moods were continually interrupting each other. Partly on this account, he did not possess an assured style. Partly, of course, a kind of indifference, inherited or developed, was to blame; in his formative stage, he did not have the patience--as he himself told Longfellow--to write slowly enough. The result is, our enjoyment of his poetry comes from separate passages, not from organically constituted, harmonious wholes. In the occasional felicitous expression of an individual thought, few can surpass him: