As to his individual achievements, he not only never thought of himself more highly than he ought to think, but was the rather inclined to place too low an estimate on the value of his work. Self-distrust increased with years. Nevertheless, Lowell indulged himself in no philosophy of despair. He had had much to be grateful for. ‘I have always believed that a man’s fate is born with him, and that he cannot escape from it nor greatly modify it’ (Lowell once wrote to his friend Charles Eliot Norton) ‘and that consequently every one gets in the long run exactly what he deserves, neither more nor less.’ Lowell goes on to say that the creed is a ‘cheerful’ one; he might have added that it is no less sensible and manly than it is cheerful. Whether he found his creed satisfactory at all times or was always conscious that he had a creed, we cannot know, but he could be the blithest of fatalists when it pleased him to be. III POET AND PROSE WRITER Lowell’s prose is manly, direct, varied, flexible, generally harmonious, abounding in passages marked by grace, beauty, and sweetness, and capable of rising to genuine eloquence. In its overflowing vitality and human warmth it is an adequate expression of the man, imaging his mocking and humorous moods no less than his deep sincerity, his strength of purpose, and his passion. Much of it has the confidence and ease that go with successful improvisation. If Lowell was ‘willing to risk the prosperity of a verse upon a lucky throw of words,’ he was even more willing to take like chances with his prose. His thought ran easily into figurative form, and the making of metaphor was as natural to him as breathing. He would even amuse himself with conceits, for he loved to play with language, to force words into shapes he might perchance have condemned had he found them in the work of another. But if style is to be representative, this playfulness, however annoying to Lowell’s critics, is a virtue. A Lowell chastened in his English and wholly academic would not be the Lowell we rejoice in. He practised the art of poetry in many forms and always with success. Of everything he wrote you might say that it had been his study, though you might refrain from saying that ‘it had been all in all his study.’ In other words, as we read Lowell the question never arises whether or not the poet is working in unfamiliar materials, but whether he might not have given his product a higher finish, the materials and the form remaining the same. He was no aspirant after flawless beauty. He wrote spontaneously and was for the time wholly possessed by his theme. But what he had written he had written; and if never content with the result he at least compelled himself to be philosophical. He made a few changes, to be sure, but (as was said of a far greater poet) he would correct with an afterglow of poetic inspiration, not with a painful tinkering of the verse.