Together with _Fireside Travels_ may be read ‘My Garden Acquaintance’ and ‘A Good Word for Winter,’ from _My Study Windows_, gossipy papers on Nature by one who looked on ‘a great deal of the modern sentimentalism about Nature as a mark of disease ... one more symptom of the general liver complaint.’ The sincerity of Lowell’s love of birds, beasts, flowers, trees, the sky and the landscape, admits of no question. Yet he approached Nature more or less through literature, as was becoming in a man brought up on White’s _Selborne_; and he seems his characteristic self when, having pulled a chair out under a tree, he sits there with a volume of Chaucer in his hands, looking up from the page now and then to watch his feathered neighbors, and make wise and humorous comments on their doings. _Among My Books_ is a volume of literary and historical studies, six in number, entitled respectively, ‘Dryden,’ ‘Witchcraft,’ ‘Shakespeare Once More,’ ‘New England Two Centuries Ago,’ ‘Lessing,’ ‘Rousseau and the Sentimentalists.’ All are in Lowell’s best manner, and the ‘Dryden’ and ‘Shakespeare’ are particularly fine examples of those leisurely, stimulating, and always brilliant literary studies which this scholar knew so well how to write. Of the thirteen papers in _My Study Windows_ that on ‘Abraham Lincoln’[67] and the one ‘On a Certain Condescension in Foreigners’ have a political bearing; those on ‘A Great Public Character’ (Josiah Quincy) and ‘Emerson the Lecturer’ are studies in personality; the ‘Library of Old Authors’ is an exercise in textual criticism, a merciless arraignment of certain unfortunate editors; the ‘Carlyle,’ ‘James Gates Percival,’ ‘Thoreau,’ ‘Swinburne’s Tragedies,’ ‘Chaucer,’ and ‘Pope’ are studies in literary history and interpretation. _Among My Books_, ‘second series,’ contains five essays. More than a third of the volume is devoted to a study of ‘Dante,’ elaborate and exhaustive--as the word ‘exhaustive’ might be used in speaking of an essay not of a book. Then follows a most sympathetic essay on ‘Spenser,’ together with papers on ‘Milton,’ ‘Wordsworth,’ and ‘Keats.’ Of Lowell’s critical writings as a whole it may be said that better reading does not exist; and among the virtues of these essays is their length. Lowell would have been ill at ease in the limits of three or four thousand words too often imposed by the editors of our current magazines. He might even have been scornful of a public taste which dictated to editors to dictate to their contributors limits so narrow. Writing from the fulness of a well-stored mind, he liked room in which to display his thought. Having much to say, he did not scruple to take time to say it; but the time always goes quickly. He understood perfectly the art of beguiling one into forgetting the hours as they pass.