The form in which the lectures were reported, sometimes direct, sometimes indirect, undoubtedly robs them of some of the charm which the hearers acknowledged, but enough remains to give one a tolerably clear impression of Lowell’s mode of treatment. The first lecture was occupied with definitions, and in a familiar way Lowell set about distinguishing poetry from prose, and by a variety of illustrations gave some notion of the great operations of the imagination. Having cleared the way, he took up the consideration of English poetry in the historical order, dealing with the forerunners, Piers Ploughman’s Vision, the Metrical Romances, and the Ballads; and then devoting one lecture each to Chaucer, Spenser, Milton, Butler, and Pope. The discussion of Pope led him to interrupt himself, and in the next lecture take up the subject of Poetic Diction, for after expressing his admiration of the consummate art of Pope’s artificiality, he wished to inquire whether there might not be a real, vital distinction between the language of prose raised to a high degree of metrical efficiency and the language of poetry. His readers will recall the amusing passage in an article on “Swinburne’s Tragedies,” in which, when wishing to illustrate the Greek battledoor and shuttlecock style of dialogue, he finds it easier to make a burlesque imitation than to hunt up some passage in Sophocles. In like manner he invents a piece of descriptive verse--a Lapland sketch--as an instance of the artificial manner brought in by Pope, but lacking his wonderful manipulation of language. It is a felicitous example of Lowell’s imitative faculty, which led him, when he began to write, to throw off lines in Burns’s manner, but which never betrayed him when he was in earnest in poetry. The imitation was in itself a criticism. He liked to emphasize the essential element of poetry by instancing the empty form. Mr. Dante Rossetti once overpowered me by producing a thin volume of verse by T. H. Chivers, M. D., and reading aloud from it and demanding information about the author. When I applied to Lowell afterward, he said that Dr. Chivers had been wont to send him his books, and he read them aloud to his classes as illustrations of the shell of Shelley. A lecture followed on Wordsworth, and then the twelfth was devoted to the Function of the Poet, which in its brief report intimates that Lowell was thinking less of himself than of the country with its need of a seer.