God with us is
forever the mystical name of the hour that is passing. The lives of the
great poets teach us that they were the men of their generation who felt
most deeply the meaning of the present.
HUMOR, WIT, FUN, AND SATIRE
PREFATORY NOTE
In the winter of 1855, when Lowell was thirty-six years old, he gave a
course of twelve lectures before the Lowell Institute in Boston. His
subject was the English Poets, and the special topics of the successive
lectures were: 1, "Poetry, and the Poetic Sentiment," illustrating the
imaginative faculty; 2, "Piers Ploughman's Vision," as the first
characteristically English poem; 3, "The Metrical Romances," marking the
advent into our poetry of the sense of Beauty; 4, "The Ballads,"
especially as models of narrative diction; 5, Chaucer, as the poet of
real life--the poet outside of nature; 6, Spenser, as the representative
of the purely poetical; 7, Milton, as representing the imaginative; 8,
Butler, as the wit; 9, Pope, as the poet of artificial life; 10, "On
Poetic Diction"; 11, Wordsworth, as representing the egotistic
imaginative, or the poet feeling himself in nature; 12, "On the Function
and Prospects of Poetry."
These lectures were written rapidly, many of them during the period of
delivery of the course; they bore marks of hastiness of composition, but
they came from a full and rich mind, and they were the issues of
familiar studies and long reflection.
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