passes at once into a lecture on his treatment of Longfellow. Poe was not a blackboard on which Lowell wrote his own virtues, but it is an illustration of the dominant ethical note in Lowell’s nature, especially at this time, that open as he was to the influence of poetry, and keenly sensitive to the melody and color to be found in exquisite language, he could not detach poetry from character. In his leaning toward reform, he tried to take poetry with him as a fellow-worker, but I do not think this really affected his judgment of Poe, and Briggs’s amusing report of Poe’s consignment of reformers to the mad-house was not likely to gall him; his sense of humor would correct any irritation. But Lowell did hold his head high and was intoxicated with the spirit of idealism; he and his wife stimulated each other, and breathing this air, he was not in a mood to be indulgent toward what he conceived to be lower ideals. The biographical essay which a few years later he wrote on Keats shows clearly how desirous he was of bringing the few known facts of that poet’s life into accord with a lofty conception of the poetic spirit; standing uncomfortably near Poe, he was in danger of interpreting his poetry by the comment which his life afforded. Although literature then as always was the constant factor in Lowell’s resolve, the circumstances in which he was placed, and his own uneasy sense that he ought to bear his part in the moral uprising, led him to expend a good deal of energy this winter in political and ethical writing. He was living in the midst of the Society of Friends and breathing an atmosphere of anti-slavery reform; the great debate on Texas was raging, and, more than all, his wife by his side kept a steady flame of zeal burning. He let himself out once in verse when he sent to the _Boston Courier_ some stanzas headed “Another Rallying Cry by a Yankee,” in which, with a vehemence that allowed little breathing space for wit or humor, he declaimed against the iniquity of the Texas resolutions, then on the eve of passage, and made a passionate appeal to his native state to hold herself aloof from any compromise with slavery. “O Spirit of the noble Past, when the old Bay State was free,” he began, and employed all the resources of type to make his protest heard:-- “And though all other deeds of thine, dear Fatherland, should be Washed out, like writing upon sand, by Time’s encroaching sea, That single word shall stand sublime, nor perish with the rest, ‘THOUGH THE WHOLE WORLD SANCTION SLAVERY, IN GOD’S NAME WE PROTEST!’” The final stanza was a burst of state independence: “No, if the old Bay State were sunk, and, as in days of yore, One single ship within her sides the hope of Freedom bore, Run up again the pine tree flag, and on the chainless sea That flag should mark, where’er it waved, the island of the free!”