delightful, and, by and large, I would place them second to none in the language. But they are sometimes too literary and have the faults of his prose writing in general. Wit was always his temptation, misleading him now and then into a kind of Yankee smartness and a disposition to show off. His temperament was buoyant, impulsive; there was to the last a good deal of the boy about Lowell. Letter writing is a friendly art, and Lowell’s warm expressions of love for his friends are most genuine. His epistolary style, like his essay style, is lavish and seldom chastened or toned down to the exquisite simplicity which distinguishes the best letters of Gray and Cowper. And so Lowell is always getting in his own way, tripping himself up over his superabundance of matter. Still, as a whole, I know no collected letters richer in thought, humor, and sentiment. And one may trace in them, read consecutively, the gradual ripening and refining of a highly gifted mind and a nature which had at once nobility and charm of thought. Lowell speaks admiringly of Emerson’s “gracious impersonality.” Now impersonality is the last thing we expect of a letter writer. Emerson could write a good letter on occasion, as may be seen by a dip almost anywhere into the Carlyle-Emerson correspondence. But when Mr. Cabot was preparing his life of Emerson and applied to Henry James, Senior, for permission to read his letters to Emerson, Mr. James replied, not without a touch of petulance: “Emerson always kept one at such arm’s length, tasting him and sipping him and trying him, to make sure that he was worthy of his somewhat prim and bloodless friendship, that it was fatiguing to write him letters. I can’t recall any serious letter I ever sent him. I remember well what maidenly letters I used to receive from him.” We know what doctrine Emerson held on the subject of “persons.” But it is just this personality which makes Lowell the prince of letter writers. He may attract, he may irritate, but he never fails to interest us in himself. Even in his books it is the man in the book that interests most.