he had outlined the function of the poet; and the whole set of his nature in the months between his engagement and his marriage was in the direction of poetic earnestness. His conception was dominated by moral enthusiasm: the preacher in him was always thrusting himself to the front, and the reformer of the day sometimes masqueraded in his verse in very antique forms. But his genuine love of art above all his unfailing apprehension of poetry as an end in itself saved him from a merely utilitarian notion of his high calling. And it is safe to say that he never was so happy as when he was abandoning himself to the full enjoyment of poetic composition. He diverted the streams of love and of anti-slavery fervor into this full current, and could say of his “Prometheus” that it was “overrunning with true radicalism and anti-slavery;” but the exhilaration which fanned his wings was the consciousness of youth and love finding an outlet in the natural voice of poetry. “I was never so happy as now,” he writes to Loring, 15 June, after telling of his “Prometheus” and “A Legend of Brittany,” on which he was at work. “I see Maria every other day. I am embowered in leaves, have a voluntary orchestra of birds and bees and frogs, and a little family of chickens to whom I have a sort of feeling of paternity, and begin to believe I had some share in begetting them.” Page painted Lowell’s portrait when he was in New York and exhibited it in the spring. This picture is at once a likeness of the poet and an expression of the painter. Page was an idealist who found a most congenial subject in Lowell. Out of the dark canvass--for the painter, pursuing the elusive phantom of a recovery of the art of the Venetians, succeeded at any rate in giving to his work an ancient air--there looks forth a face which is the very apparition of poetry. Far removed from the sentimental aspect, it has depth of feeling, a serene assurance, and a Shakespearean ideality. It is not difficult to see that Page was not painting in Lowell a young Cambridge author, but the student of the English dramatists and the inheritor of all the ages of poetry. To his own neighbors and friends Lowell had much of this air in his presence. His flowing chestnut hair falling in rich masses from an equally dividing line, his unshorn face, his eyes with their kindly wistful look, his tremulous mouth,--all served to separate him in appearance from common men and to mark him as an unusual person.