In the same number of the _Review_ which holds this article on Carlyle appears a shorter one on Swinburne, which, though dealing with a more occasional subject, also illustrates the temper in which Lowell was now writing, and has a special interest, since it deals directly with poetry and intimates, that when treating of a contemporary writer his mind was most set on that aspect of poetry which ignores the distinction of time. The phenomenon of a new poet sends him back into an inquiry into the very realities of poetry itself. Though he has a few specific criticisms of Swinburne’s “Chastelard” and his “Atalanta in Calydon,” the theme which interests him most is the possibility of reënacting antiquity in poetry, and he devotes the larger part of his paper to a demonstration of the truth that the result of all such endeavors is to produce the artificial and not the artistic. In a letter to Mr. Stedman, written apparently when this subject was fresh in his mind, he repeats his conclusion with the force of a friendly letter writer. Mr. Stedman had thanked him for a review of his poem, “Alice of Monmouth,” but asks his judgment of another poem he had written on an antique theme. “I will answer frankly,” wrote Lowell, “that I did not like Alektryon, and don’t think him at all to be compared to his sister Alice,--a strutting fellow that wants to make me believe he can crow in ancient Greek. Alice is Christian, modern, American, and that’s why I like her. I don’t believe in these modern antiques--no, not in Landor, not in Swinburne, not in any of ’em. They are all wrong. It’s like writing Latin verses--the material you work in is dead.” Though Lowell had thus turned with avidity to his more congenial field of letters, he was not yet to be released from the duty imposed upon him by his editorship of the _Review_, and by his own political thought, of taking part in the discussion which Reconstruction raised. In the same number of the _North American_ which contained the two papers just noted, he wrote also an article on “The President on the Stump,” which, after a cursory consideration of the growing division between President Johnson and Congress, closed with a hypothetical address delivered to a Southern delegation by an imaginary President Johnson. Into this address Lowell packed his convictions as to the attitude which should be taken toward the Southern States by a President who had come from the South. It was so unusual for Lowell to dramatize, even in poetry, that this assumption has a singular interest, and, barring the element of Southern birth, is a close copy of Lowell’s mind at this time. Every man of thought has his dream of action, and we can read in this speech how Lowell would have translated his ideals of truth, freedom, and justice into executive acts, could he, who had watched the conflict closely, have had the chance that poets picture of being king for a day.