influence even so long ago as the ‘Simple Cobbler of Agawam,’ published in 1647. Its author, Ward, had taken his second degree at Cambridge and was a man past middle life when be came over to Massachusetts, but I think his book would have been a different book had he written it in England. This Americanism which is there because we cannot help it, not put there because it is expected of us, gives, I think, a new note to our better literature and is what makes it fresh and welcome to foreign ears. We have developed, if we did not invent, a form of racy, popular humor, as original as it is possible for anything to be, which has found ideal utterance through the genius of ‘Mark Twain.’ I confess that I look upon this general sense of the comic among our people and the ready wit which condenses it into epigram, as one of the safeguards of our polity. If it be irreverent it is not superstitious; it has little respect for phrases; and no nonsense can long look it in the eye without flinching.” * * * * * “Heartsease and Rue” was published in the early spring of 1888 and immediately afterward Lowell printed in the _Atlantic_ his poem “Turner’s Old Téméraire, under a Figure symbolizing the Church.” This poem and “How I consulted the Oracle of the Goldfishes,” which appeared in the _Atlantic_ for August, 1889, were printed in the thin posthumous volume of “Last Poems,” and belong thus in the group which most effectively represents Lowell’s mood on the profoundest themes at the end of his life. The first poem in “Heartsease and Rue,” that on Agassiz, which heads the section entitled Friendship, has already been noted in connection with the time when it was written. A little of the same pathos of parting with old friends is in the postscript of the letter to Curtis, and in this as in the former, the poet’s mind runs on naturally in its speculation to the new To Be. A single hint of a thought which filled many of Lowell’s hours occurs in the poem when he says:-- “With bits of wreck I patch the boat shall bear Me to that unexhausted Otherwhere;” but it is in the group of poems referred to above that one sees most clearly a recurrence to the great underlying questions of faith. With a half-mocking smile Lowell asks in “Credidimus Jovem regnare” if science has found the key which religion has lost, and falls back on the somewhat lame conclusion that he had best keep his key, which may be but a rusty inheritance, on the chance that the door and lock may some day be made to fit the key. Again, in the poem “How I consulted the Oracle of the Goldfishes,” where he muses over the realities and illusions of the spiritual world, he does not deny the doubts that have arisen in his own mind, but after all refuses to permit even his doubts to dismay him.