In no one of his books can the reader discern better the spontaneous element in Lowell’s mind, and the length to which he could go under the impulse of the immediate thought. So fluent was he, so unaware of any effort, and so swept away for the time being by the stream of his ideas, that he seemed to himself as one possessed, and more than once he hinted darkly that he was not writing the book, but was the spokesman for sages and poets who used him as their means of communication. The visionary faculty which he possessed could easily be confused at this time with the half-rapt condition of the mind fed with emotional ardor. The book, as we have seen, was written at full speed, and it reflects the generous nature of the writer; but it reflects also the untempered thought, and registers judgments in the process of making. Running through the entire book, and making the real excuse for it, is Lowell’s study of the essence of poetry. This is what gives to the volume its chief interest; it is really a half-conscious explication of the concern which was most agitating his mind at this time. What was poetry? Could it be the substance of a man’s life? There is a prosecution of some of the same problems which recently he had been trying to solve in his own volume of poems. He had to ask himself if he was a poet. The witness for that was to be found not so much in his taste and his preferences in literature, nor solely in the delight which he took in versification; he felt the stirring in his nature of that high vocation of the poet which makes him a seer and an interpreter. His impulse was to yield to it, but the question arose, What was he to interpret? What was there in life about him which was crying out for articulation? And here, if I mistake not, he fell into some confusion of mind through the insistence of one particular incarnation of divine thought. He was conscious and aware of a momentous idea, that of freedom expressed in terms of human brotherhood, words which even then had the dull ring of cant when they were used by counterfeit-minded men, yet had in the minds of genuine men and women a vibrant and exultant sound as if they were to pay all the debts of poor human nature. Remembering that this was on the eve of ’48, when the visionaries of Europe and America were very sure that they saw a great light, one sees how forcible this idea could be as a motive in the throbbing and ingenuous heart of a young American who was quite sure he was called to high endeavor.