There is little doubt that Lowell had been too fastidious when he wrote to James T. Fields, in May, 1855: “It has just got through my skull, and made a dint into my sensorium, that you wrote me a note, ever so long ago, about my lectures and the publication of them. I don’t mean to print them yet--nor ever till they are better--but, at any rate, I consider myself one of your flock, though not, perhaps, as lanigerous as some of them.” And when Lowell’s literary executor wrote: “His powers of critical appreciation and reflection were displayed to advantage in these lectures. No such discourses had been heard in America. They added greatly to his reputation as critic, scholar, and poet,”--there could be no hesitation in setting aside Lowell’s modest self-depreciation. After the delivery of his first lecture, he had written to his friend Stillman: “So far as the public are concerned, I have succeeded.” And his words are as true in 1896 as they were in 1855; and although his literary art was not so consummate as it became in his ultimate development, these early lectures will aid and encourage the student by showing his growth: we see the rivulet become the flowing river. We share, too, in the delight of his first audience on reading: “The lines of Dante seem to answer his every mood: sometimes they have the compressed implacability of his lips, sometimes they ring like an angry gauntlet thrown down in defiance, and sometimes they soften or tremble as if that stern nature would let its depth of pity show itself only in a quiver of the voice.” “So in ‘Paradise Lost’ not only is there the pomp of long passages that move with the stately glitter of Milton’s own angelic squadrons, but if you meet anywhere a single verse, that, too, is obstinately epic, and you recognize it by its march as certainly as you know a friend by his walk.” “Who can doubt the innate charm of rhyme whose eye has ever been delighted by the visible consonance of a tree growing at once toward an upward and a downward heaven, on the edge of the unrippled river; or as the kingfisher flits from shore to shore, his silent echo flies under him and completes the vanishing couplet in the visionary world below.” “Every desire of the heart finds its gratification in the poet because he always speaks imaginatively and satisfies ideal hungers.” And see, too, how the “powers of critical appreciation” that Professor Norton has mentioned were bursting into blossom and giving promise of the golden harvest to come: “Sir Thomas Browne, * * * a man who gives proof of more imagination than any other Englishman except Shakspeare.” For subtlety and depth of insight Lowell has never excelled this early example, nor has he ever outdone the critical estimate, so true and so terse, of his final pronouncement upon Pope: “Measured by any high standard of imagination, he will be found wanting; tried by any test of wit, he is unrivaled.”