If the article seem too short for a Review, you are welcome to insert it among your literary notices, or to return it. I must thank you before I close my note for the pleasure I received in reading a recent sermon of yours which I saw in the _Chronotype._ You have not so much mounted the pulpit as lifted it up to you. Very truly your Eumenides-driven contributor, J. R. L.[84] The most substantial magazine in his own neighborhood was the _North American Review_, and to that, in his early period, Lowell contributed but half a dozen articles. It is partly characteristic of the manner of the heavy reviewing of the day, and wholly characteristic of Lowell, that in each of these cases quite two thirds of the article is taken up with prolegomena. Before he could settle down to an examination of “The New Timon,” he must needs analyze at great length the quality of Pope, who had served as a sort of pattern: it is interesting, by the way, to note that in the last paragraph of his review, he guesses the book to have been written by Bulwer. So in reviewing Disraeli’s “Tancred,” he despatches the book itself somewhat summarily after a dozen pages of witty reflections on novel-writing. A review of Browning is more definitely an examination of this poet, with large extracts from “Luria,” though it has the inevitable long introduction on poetry in general; but its appreciation and discriminating judgment of Browning at a time when “Sordello,” “Paracelsus,” and “Bells and Pomegranates” were the only poems and collection by which to measure him, indicate surely how direct and at first hand were Lowell’s critical appraisals. “Above all,” he says, after a glowing rehearsal of the contents of “Bells and Pomegranates,” “his personages are not mere mouthpieces for the author’s idiosyncrasies. We take leave of Mr. Browning at the end of ‘Sordello,’ and except in some shorter lyrics see no more of him. His men and women _are_ men and women, and not Mr. Browning masquerading in different colored dominoes:” and in the same article occurs a passage which might lead one to think Lowell was musing over his own qualities: “Wit makes other men laugh, and that only once. It may be repeated indefinitely to new audiences and produce the same result. Humor makes the humorist himself laugh. He is a part of his humor, and it can never be repeated without loss.”