"They are slaves who dare not be In the right with two or three," and the passage beginning "Truth forever on the scaffold, Wrong forever on the throne," became watchwords in the struggle against slavery and disunion. Some of these were published in his volume of 1848 and the collected edition of his poems, in two volumes, issued in 1850. These also included his most ambitious narrative poem, the _Vision of Sir Launfal_, an allegorical and spiritual treatment of one of the legends of the Holy Grail. Lowell's genius was not epical, but lyric and didactic. The merit of _Sir Launfal_ is not in the telling of the story, but in the beautiful descriptive episodes, one of which, commencing, "And what is so rare as a day in June? Then if ever come perfect days," is as current as any thing that he has written. It is significant of the lack of a natural impulse toward narrative invention in Lowell that, unlike Longfellow and Holmes, he never tried his hand at a novel. One of the most important parts of a novelist's equipment he certainly possesses, namely, an insight into character and an ability to delineate it. This gift is seen especially in his sketch of Parson Wilbur, who edited the _Biglow Papers_ with a delightfully pedantic introduction, glossary, and notes; in the prose essay _On a Certain Condescension in Foreigners_, and in the uncompleted poem, _Fitz Adam's Story_. See also the sketch of Captain Underhill in the essay on _New England Two Centuries Ago_. The _Biglow Papers_ when brought out in a volume were prefaced by imaginary notices of the press, including a capital parody of Carlyle, and a reprint from the "Jaalam Independent Blunderbuss," of the first sketch--afterward amplified and enriched--of that perfect Yankee idyl, _The Courtin'_. Between 1862 and 1865 a second series of _Biglow Papers_ appeared, called out by the events of the civil war. Some of these, as, for instance, _Jonathan to John_, a remonstrance with England for her unfriendly attitude toward the North, were not inferior to any thing in the earlier series; and others were even superior as poems, equal, indeed, in pathos and intensity to any thing that Lowell has written in his professedly serious verse. In such passages the dialect wears rather thin, and there is a certain incongruity between the rustic spelling and the vivid beauty and power and the figurative cast of the phrase in stanzas like the following: "Wut's words to them whose faith an' truth On war's red techstone rang true metal, Who ventered life an' love an' youth For the gret prize o' death in battle? To him who, deadly hurt, agen Flashed on afore the charge's thunder, Tippin' with fire the bolt of men That rived the rebel line asunder?"