The special piece of writing which did occupy him for awhile, an introduction to Isaak Walton’s “Complete Angler,” may fairly be called one of the happiest of his literary appreciations. He writes, to be sure, to Dr. Mitchell that he is “thoroughly fagged” with the work, but to the unsuspecting reader who comes upon it in the volume of Lowell’s “Latest Literary Essays and Addresses” there is the sense only of a quieter tone than he finds in the Gray, for example, in the same volume. There is no lack of acuteness, rather one is struck with the delicacy of the criticism, but the special charm is in the delight which Lowell takes in his sunny-tempered author. It is as if he had been thoroughly fagged when he took Walton down and as he read the “Lives” and the “Complete Angler” was drawn within the cheerful mind of Walton and warmed himself at the open fire of his charity. The paper has the value one finds so often in Lowell’s writings, of reflecting the writer’s mood, and one who has followed Lowell into the recesses of his consciousness of age can scarcely fail to bear him company when he finds him writing of Walton: “But what justifies and ennobles these lower loves (of music, painting, good ale, and a pipe), what gives him a special and native aroma like that of Alexander, is that above all he loved the beauty of holiness and those ways of taking and of spending life that make it wholesome for ourselves and our fellows. His view of the world is not of the widest, but it is the Delectable Mountains that bound the prospect. Never surely was there a more lovable man, nor one to whom love found access by more avenues of sympathy.”