‘Under the Willows’ is a poem of Nature in which the poet at no time loses sight either of the world of books or of the world of men. If he be driven indoors by the rigors of May, he is content to sit by his wood-fire and read what the poets have said in praise of that inclement month. Or if June has come and he can dream under his favorite willows, his reveries gain a zest from the interruptions of the tramp, ‘lavish summer’s bedesman,’ the scissors-grinder, that grimy Ulysses of New England, the school-children, and the road-menders, Vexing Macadam’s ghost with pounded slate. It is a poem of thanksgiving in which the poet voices his gratitude for the benediction of the higher mood and the human kindness of the lower. The volume to which ‘Under the Willows’ gives its name is typical. He who prizes Lowell’s verse will hardly be content with any selection which does not include ‘Al Fresco,’ ‘A Winter-Evening Hymn to my Fire,’ ‘Invita Minerva,’ ‘The Dead House,’ ‘The Parting of the Ways,’ ‘The Fountain of Youth,’ and ‘The Nightingale in the Study.’ Its manner of contrasting To-Day with Yesterday, the genius that creates with the spirit that analyzes, makes _The Cathedral_ an essentially American poem. The minster in its ‘vast repose,’ Silent and gray as forest-leaguered cliff, must always seem a marvel to a dweller among temples of ‘deal and paint.’ The poem is the meditation of a New-World conservative, altogether catholic of sympathies, who holds no less firmly to the past because, under the fascination of democracy, he breathes in the presence of the ‘backwoods Charlemagne’ a braver air and is conscious of an ‘ampler manhood.’ And what, he asks, will be the faith of this new avatar of the Goth, what temples will the creature build? Very beautiful, very suggestive, and in its shifting moods entirely representative of the poet who wrote it must this fine work always seem. _The Ode recited at the Harvard Commemoration_ (July 21, 1865) is Lowell’s supreme achievement in verse. It breathes the most exalted patriotism, a love of native land that is intense, fiery, consuming. Though written in honor of sons of the University who had gone to the war, the spirit of the _Ode_ is not local and particular. The poet celebrates not individual deeds alone but the sum of those deeds, not man but manhood:-- That leap of heart whereby a people rise Up to a noble anger’s height, And, flamed on by the Fates, not shrink, but grow more bright, That swift validity in noble veins, Of choosing danger and disdaining shame, Of being set on flame By the pure fire that flies all contact base, But wraps its chosen with angelic might, These are imperishable gains, Sure as the sun, medicinal as light, These hold great futures in their lusty reins And certify to earth a new imperial race.