In the more substantial literary criticism of his maturity Lowell occupied himself mainly with the great names of world literature, but at this time he was especially intent on his contemporaries in America and England, and he was keenly alive to manifestations of spirit which gave evidence of transcending the bounds of local reputation. In a review of Longfellow’s “Kavanagh” he made the book really only a peg from which to hang a long disquisition upon nationality in literature, a subject which, it will be remembered, receives considerable attention in the book. Lowell’s own conclusion is that “Nationality is only a less narrow form of provincialism, a sublimer sort of clownishness and ill manners.” It was with the heartiest good-will that he welcomed Thoreau’s “Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers,” just after the publication of that book. As in his other reviews of this period, he must needs preface his consideration of the book itself with some general remarks on travellers, which he liked well enough to preserve in his “Leaves from my Journal in Italy and Elsewhere,” published in “Fireside Travels;” but the main part of his article is a generous appreciation of Thoreau’s faculty of insight into the things of nature. “A graduate of Cambridge,--the fields and woods, the axe, the hoe, and the rake have since admitted him _ad eundem_. Mark how his imaginative sympathy goes beneath the crust, deeper down than that of Burns, and needs no plough to turn up the object of its muse.” He makes, however, a clear distinction between Thoreau the observer and man of reflection and Thoreau the bookman. “As long as he continues an honest Boswell, his book is delightful; but sometimes he serves his two rivers as Hazlitt did Northcote, and makes them run Thoreau or Emerson, or, indeed, anything but their own transparent element. What, for instance, have Concord and Merrimack to do with Boodh, themselves professors of an elder and to them wholly sufficient religion, namely, the willing subjects of watery laws, to seek their ocean? We have digressions on Boodh, on Anacreon (with translations hardly so good as Cowley), on Perseus, on Friendship, and we know not what. We come upon them like snags, jolting us headforemost out of our places as we are rowing placidly up stream, or drifting down. Mr. Thoreau becomes so absorbed in these discussions that he seems, as it were, to catch a crab, and disappears uncomfortably from his seat at the bow-oar. We could forgive them all, especially that on Books, and that on Friendship (which is worthy of one who has so long commerced with Nature and with Emerson), we could welcome them all, were they put by themselves at the end of the book. But as it is, they are out of proportion and out of place, and mar our Merrimacking dreadfully. We were bid to a river-party, not to be preached at. They thrust themselves obtrusively out of the narrative, like those quarries of red glass which the Bowery dandies (emulous of