And the poet longs for skill to praise him fitly whom he does fitly praise in the stanzas that follow. It is a thoughtful, nobly eloquent, and poetically beautiful characterization of the great Virginian, and appropriately closes with a fine apostrophe to the historic Commonwealth from which Washington sprang. The ‘Ode for the Fourth of July, 1876,’ though not lacking in forceful lines and fine imagery, is the least happy of the three poems. The questioning and critical mood is prominent. But the spirit of confidence prevails and is voiced in the invocation with which the ode concludes. Various notes are touched in the collection of eighty-eight poems to which its author gave the title of _Heartsease and Rue_. Here are verses new and old, grave and gay, satirical, humorous, sentimental, and elegiac, epigrams, inscriptions, lyrics, poems of occasion, sonnets, epistles, and, chief among them, the ode written on hearing the news of the death of Agassiz. Whether, as has been asserted, ‘this poem takes its place with the few great elegies in our language, gives a hand to “Lycidas” and to “Thyrsis,”’ is a question to be decided by the suffrages of many good critics, rather than by the dictum of one. There is no doubt, however, that by virtue of its human quality, depth of personal feeling, sincerity in the accent of bereavement, and felicity of phrase, the ‘Agassiz’ will always stand in the first rank of Lowell’s greater verse. VI _FIRESIDE TRAVELS_, _MY STUDY WINDOWS_, _AMONG MY BOOKS_, _LATEST LITERARY ESSAYS_ _Fireside Travels_ is so entertaining a book as to make one wish that Lowell had chronicled more of his journeyings at home and abroad in the same amusing style. Two of the six essays--‘Cambridge Thirty Years Ago’ and ‘A Moosehead Journal’--take the form of letters addressed to the author’s friend, ‘the Edelmann Storg’ (W. W. Story). The others are grouped under the general title of ‘Leaves from my Journal in Italy and Elsewhere.’ One spirit animates the pages of this book,--a love of plain people, homely adventures, everyday sights and sounds. In a half-serious way (as if to show that he knows how to ‘do’ a tempest in the mountains or an illumination of St. Peter’s) Lowell throws in a number of unconventional passages on entirely conventional themes. But the strength of the book lies in the sympathetic and humorous accounts of that protean animal Man, who, whether he showed himself in the guise of a denizen of Old Cambridge, or of Uncle Zeb, who had been ‘to the ‘Roostick war,’ or of the Chief Mate of the packet ship, or of Leopoldo, the Italian guide, was more interesting to Lowell than any other object of his study.