is not impossible that Lowell, who had been interrupted in his plan, was still more reluctant to complete it, when it would have so much the air of being a copy of his neighbor’s design. At any rate, the _disjecta membra_ of the poem found publication in a straggling fashion. Writing to Mr. J. B. Thayer, in reply to an inquiry about the poem, years after, Lowell says: “‘The June Idyl’ [renamed ‘Under the Willows’] (written in ’51 or ’52) is a part of what I had written as the induction to it. The description of spring in one of the ‘Biglow Papers’ is another fragment of the same, tagged with rhyme for the nonce. So is a passage in ‘Mason and Slidell,’ beginning ‘Oh strange new world.’ The ‘Voyage to Vinland,’ the ‘Pictures from Appledore,’ and ‘Fitz-Adam’s Story’ were written for the ‘Nooning’ as originally planned. So, you see, I had made some progress. Perhaps it will come by and by--not in the shape I meant at first, for something broke my life in two, and I cannot piece it together again. Besides, the Muse asks _all_ of a man, and for many years I have been unable to give myself up as I would.” To this list should be added “Fragments of an Unfinished Poem,” which was printed in the author’s final Riverside edition, when he had abandoned all thought of completing the “Nooning.” That Lowell was conscious of his vocation by this time, and that with the publication of his collected poems he was entering upon a new, resolute course of poetic action, is clear from a few pregnant sentences in a letter to Briggs, dated 23 January, 1850: My poems hitherto have been a true record of my life, and I mean that they shall continue to be.... I begin to feel that I must enter on a new year of my apprenticeship. My poems have thus far had a regular and natural sequence. First, Love and the mere happiness of existence beginning to be conscious of itself, then Freedom--both being the sides which Beauty presented to me--and now I am going to try more _wholly_ after Beauty herself. Next, if I live, I shall present Life as I have seen it. In the ‘Nooning’ I shall have not even a glance towards Reform. If the poems I have already written are good for anything they are perennial, and it is tedious as well as foolish to repeat one’s self. I have preached sermons enow, and now I am going to come down out of the pulpit and _go about among my parish_. I shall turn my barrel over and read my old discourses; it will be time to write new ones when my hearers have sucked all the meaning out of those old ones. Certainly I shall not grind for any Philistines, whether Reformers or Conservatives. I find that Reform cannot take up the whole of me, and I am quite sure that eyes were given us to look about us with sometimes, and not to be always looking forward. If some of my good red-hot friends were to see this they would call me a backslider, but there are other directions in which one may get away from people besides the rearward one.... I am not