product of the American soil presaged for him the development of a race of freemen. CHAPTER XI POETRY AND PROSE 1858-1872 Lowell’s writing during the war, and very largely also during the four previous years in which he had been engaged on the _Atlantic_, was mainly of a political character, and it has seemed best not to interrupt the record with much reference to his other writings and his pursuits generally during these eight years. But though he felt keenly the great movement which was breaking up the old union and making way for the new and greater union, he was too established in his own order of life to permit that to undergo any violent change. Even in his political writing, as we have seen, he was first of all a man of letters, with an imaginative foresight; his occupation both as a teacher and an editor gave a certain steadying force to his powers, so that though he rebelled against the irksomeness of routine he was delivered from what might have been the waywardness of a too self-centred life. His safety-valve during all this period was in his letters to his familiar friends, as it was also in the free talk which he held with them; and this, even though he chafed under restraint and pressure which seemed to him to lessen his spontaneity. “How malicious you are,” he writes to Miss Norton, 23 October, 1858, “about what I said of women’s being good letter writers! What I meant was that they wrote more unconsciously than we do. I don’t know how it is with other folks, but I cannot sit down now and write a letter as if I were talking. Good writing, I take it, can only result from necessity of expression, and an author satisfies that in so many ways that his letters are apt to be dull. “I like ‘Miles Standish’ better than you do. I think it in some respects the best long poem L. has written. It is so simple and picturesque, and the story is not encumbered with unavailing description, which is a fault in ‘Evangeline.’ But I quite agree with you about the metre. It is too deceitfully easy. “One might begin at dawn nor end till the purple twilight, Stringing verses at will, nor know it was verse he was stringing. This is the modern way, the way of steamer and railroad Where all the work is done, you scarcely know how, by the Engine. Ah, but the Hill of Fame, can they dig it down? can they grade it? Difficult always is Good, and he, I guess, who attains it Starts with two feet and a staff and bread for To-day in his wallet, Footsore dropping at last, repaid by long hope of the summit.”