"The Cathedral," dedicated most felicitously to the late James T. Fields, the author publisher, written in 1869, was published early in the following year in the _Atlantic Monthly_, and immediately won the applause of the more thoughtful reader. It is a poem of great grandeur, suggestive in the highest degree and rich in description and literary finish. Three memorial odes, one read at the one hundredth anniversary of the fight at Concord Bridge, one under the old elm, and one for the Fourth of July, 1876, followed. The Concord ode appears to be the more striking and brilliant of the three, but all are satisfactory specimens, measured by the standard which governs the lyric. "Heartsease and Rue," is the graceful title of Mr. Lowell's last volume of verse. A good many of his personal poems are included in the collection, such as his charming epistle to George William Curtis, the elegant author of "Prue and I," one of the sweetest books ever written, inscribed to Mrs. Henry W. Longfellow, in memory of the happy hours at our castles in Spain; the magnificent apostrophe to Agassiz; the birthday offering to Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes; the lines to Whittier on his seventy-fifth birthday; the verses on receiving a copy of Mr. Austin Dobson's "Old World Idyls," and Fitz Adam's story, playful, humorous, and idyllic. In his young days, Mr. Lowell wrote much for the newspapers and serials. To the _Dial_, the organ of the transcendentalists, he contributed frequently, and his poems and prose will be found scattered through the pages of _The Democratic Review_, _The North American Review_, of which he ultimately became editor, _The Massachusetts Quarterly Review_, and the Boston _Courier_. His prose was well received by scholars. It is terse and strong, and whatever position history may assign to him as a poet there can never be any question about his place among the ablest essayists of his century. "Fireside Travels," the first of the brilliant series of prose works that we have, attract by their singular grace and graciousness. The picture of Cambridge thirty years ago, is full of charming reminiscences that must be very dear to Cambridge men and women. "The Moosehead Journal," and "Leaves from the Journal in Italy, Happily Turned," are rich in local color. "Among My Books," and "My Study Windows," the addresses on literary and political topics, and the really able paper on Democracy, which proved a formidable answer to his critics, fill out the list of Mr. Lowell's prose contributions. The literary essays are especially well done. Keats tinged his poetry when he was quite a young man. He never lost taste of Endymion or the Grecian urn, and his estimate of the poet, whose "name was writ in water," is in excellent form and full of sympathy. Wordsworth, too, he read and re-read with fresh delight, and it is interesting to compare his views of the lake poet with those of Matthew Arnold. The older