D. HOWELLS: VENETIAN LIFE
_North American Review_, October, 1866
EDGAR A. POE
_Graham's Magazine_, February, 1845;
R.W. Griswold's edition of Poe's Works (1850)
THACKERAY: ROUNDABOUT PAPERS
_North American Review_, April, 1864
TWO GREAT AUTHORS
SWIFT: FORSTER'S LIFE OF SWIFT
_The Nation_, April 13 and 20, 1876
PLUTARCH'S MORALS
_North American Review_, April, 1871
A PLEA FOR FREEDOM FROM SPEECH AND FIGURES OF SPEECH-MAKERS
_Atlantic Monthly_, December, 1860
ON POETRY AND BELLES-LETTRES
THE FUNCTION OF THE POET
This was the concluding lecture in the course which Lowell read before
the Lowell Institute in the winter of 1855. Doubtless Lowell never
printed it because, as his genius matured, he felt that its assertions
were too absolute, and that its style bore too many marks of haste in
composition, and was too rhetorical for an essay to be read in print.
How rapid was the growth of his intellectual judgment, and the
broadening of his imaginative view, may be seen by comparing it with his
essays on Swinburne, on Percival, and on Rousseau, published in 1866 and
1867--essays in which the topics of this lecture were touched upon anew,
though not treated at large.
But the spirit of this lecture is so fine, its tone so full of the
enthusiasm of youth, its conception of the poet so lofty, and the truths
it contains so important, that it may well be prized as the expression
of a genius which, if not yet mature, is already powerful, and aquiline
alike in vision and in sweep of wing.
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