In his later years James Russell Lowell was considered the major man of letters of the age, but posterity has been less kind to him. Today he is little read and is generally regarded as not being in the same league as such fellow New England luminaries as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Edgar Allan Poe, and Nathaniel Hawthorne. This situation is owing in large part to Lowell's failure to compose an acknowledged masterpiece though his two series of The Biglow Papers (1848, 1862) were highly regarded and widely read. It is often adduced that Lowell, a man of many talents and interests, spread himself too widely with the resultant sum of the parts being somewhat lacking. Still, he attained high prominence as a poet, literary and social critic, editor, abolitionist, scholar of comparative literature, Harvard professor, and diplomat. Lowell was also a consummate traveler in Europe, where, as...