pictures of human life associated with his own experience, the hurried survey of his village years--all these pictures float before his vision; and then, with an abruptness which is like the choking of the singer’s voice with tears, there wells up the thought of the little life which held as in one precious drop the love and faith of his heart. Mr. Briggs, in a letter written upon receiving the volume, says: “I have just laid it aside with my eyes full of tears after reading ‘The Changeling,’ which appears to me the greatest poem in the collection, and I think that it will be so regarded by and by, a good many years hence, when I shall be wholly forgotten and you will only be known by the free thoughts you will leave behind you.” Mr. Briggs had himself lost a child, and his grief had been commemorated by Lowell; this same letter announces the birth of a daughter. One’s personal experience often colors if it does not obscure one’s critical judgment; but in taking account of Lowell’s life and its expression, we may not overlook the fact that up to this time certainly he was singularly ingenuous in making poetry, not simply a vehicle for the conveyance of large emotions generalized from personal experience, but a precipitation of his most intimate emotions. His love, his tender feelings for his friends, his generous and ardent hopes for humanity, his passion for freedom and truth, all lay at the depths of his being; but they rose to the surface perpetually in his poems and his letters, and he had scarcely learned to hold them in check by that hard mundane wisdom which comes to most through the attrition of daily living. Thus far Lowell had looked out on life pretty steadily from the sheltered privacy of a happy home, and he was not immediately to change his surroundings; but a certain induration was now to be effected which can scarcely be said to have arrested his spontaneity, but may fairly be looked upon as leading him to regard himself more as others regarded him, as no longer “a boy of twelve behind a bearded vizor,” but as grown up and become a man of the world. For it was not long after this that the relation into which he had entered with the _National Anti-Slavery Standard_, and which had undergone a sort of suspension as we have seen, became a very close and exacting one.