No such criticism, at once
abundant in knowledge and in sympathetic insight, and distinguished by
breadth of view, as well as by fluency, grace, and power of style, had
been heard in America. They were listened to by large and enthusiastic
audiences, and they did much to establish Lowell's position as the
ablest of living critics of poetry, and, in many respects, as the
foremost of American men of letters.
In the same year he was made Professor of Belles-Lettres in Harvard
University, and after spending somewhat more than a year in Europe, in
special preparation, he entered in the autumn of 1856 upon the duties of
the chair, which he continued to occupy till 1877, when he was appointed
Minister of the United States to Spain.
During the years of his professorship he delivered numerous courses of
lectures to his classes. Few of them were written out, but they were
given more or less extemporaneously from full notes. The subject of
these courses was in general the "Study of Literature," treating in
different years of different special topics, from the literature of
Northern to that of Southern Europe, from the Kalevala and the
Niebelungen Lied to the Provencal poets; from Wolfram von Eschenbach to
Rousseau; from the cycle of romances of Charlemagne and his peers to
Dante and Shakespeare. Some of these lectures, or parts of them, were
afterward prepared for publication, with such changes as were required
to give them proper literary form; and the readers of Lowell's prose
works know what gifts of native power, what large and solid acquisitions
of learning, what wide and delightful survey of the field of life and of
letters, are to be found in his essays on Shakespeare, on Dante, on
Dryden, and on many another poet or prose writer.
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