The volume of poems to which Lowell refers in this letter came out just before Christmas, 1847. It bore the words “Second Series” on the title-page, being coupled in the author’s mind with the Poems issued four years previous. It is in the main a collection of the poems which Lowell in the past four years had scattered through papers and magazines, though he omitted several which had appeared in print, one or two of which indeed he went back and picked up on issuing his next collection a score of years later. He did not draw on his Biglow poems, reserving them for a volume by themselves, and he omitted several that were in a similar vein. There was perhaps no single poem in the new series which struck a deeper note than is to be found in one or two of the poems in the earlier collection, yet the art of the second series is firmer than that of the first, and the book as a whole is distinctly more even and more free from the mere sentimentalism which marks the previous volume. Scattered through it are a few of the more serious of his anti-slavery poems, as if for a testimony; but he does not retain the violent, not to say turgid, songs which he had thrown out upon occasions of public excitement. There is one poem among the few contributed directly to the volume, which is familiar to lovers of Lowell himself rather than of Lowell the poet, if we may take his own discrimination, and it is most likely that it was written under conditions referred to in the letter just quoted. “An Indian-Summer Reverie,” which fills sixteen pages of the little volume, near its close, bears the marks of rapid writing. It is easy to believe that Lowell, coming away from the printing-office, where he had learned that the printers needed at once more copy, paused near the willows, and in the warm, hazy November afternoon let his mind drift idly over the scene and blend with it reflections on his own life. The poet, by virtue of his gift, is always young, and yet when young is the most retrospective of men. Not yet thirty, Lowell could remember his youth, and helped by the autumn that was in the air, could see nature and man and his own full life through a medium which has the mistiness and the color of the Indian Summer. There are poetic lines and phrases in the poem, and more than all the veil of the season hangs tremulously over the whole, so that one is gently stirred by the poetic feeling of the rambling verses; yet, after all, the most enduring impression is of the young man himself in that still hour of his life, when he was conscious, not so much of a reform to which he must put his hand, as of the love of beauty, and of the vague melancholy which mingles with beauty in the soul of a susceptible poet. The river winding through the marshes, the distant sound of the ploughman, the near chatter of the chipmunk, the individual trees, each living its own life, the march of the seasons flinging lights and shadows over the broad scene, the