has more energy and a stronger intellectual fiber, while in prose he is very greatly the superior.  His first volume, A Year’s Life, 1841, gave some promise.  In 1843 he started a magazine, the Pioneer, which only reached its third number, though it counted among its contributors Hawthorne, Poe, Whittier, and Miss Barrett (afterward Mrs. Browning).  A second volume of poems, printed in 1844, showed a distinct advance, in such pieces as the Shepherd of King Admetus, Rhoecus, a classical myth, told in excellent blank verse, and the same in subject with one of Landor’s polished intaglios; and the Legend of Brittany, a narrative poem, which had fine passages, but no firmness in the management of the story.  As yet, it was evident, the young poet had not found his theme.  This came with the outbreak of the Mexican War, which was unpopular in New England, and which the Free Soil party regarded as a slave-holders’ war waged without provocation against a sister republic, and simply for the purpose of extending the area of slavery.

In 1846, accordingly, the Biglow Papers began to appear in the Boston Courier, and were collected and published in book form in 1848.  These were a series of rhymed satires upon the government and the war party, written in the Yankee dialect, and supposed to be the work of Hosea Biglow, a home-spun genius in a down-east country town, whose letters to the editor were indorsed and accompanied by the comments of the Rev. Homer Wilbur, A.M., pastor of the First Church in Jaalam, and (prospective) member of many learned societies.  The first paper was a derisive address to a recruiting sergeant, with a denunciation of the “nigger-drivin’ States” and the “Northern dough-faces;” a plain hint that the North would do better to secede than to continue doing dirty work for the South; and an expression of those universal peace doctrines which were then in the air, and to which Longfellow gave serious utterance in his Occultation of Orion.

  “Ez for war, I call it murder—­
    There you hev it plain an’ flat;
  I don’t want to go no furder
    Than my Testyment for that;
  God hez said so plump an’ fairly,
    It’s as long as it is broad,
  An’ you’ve gut to git up airly
    Ef you want to take in God.”

The second number was a versified paraphrase of a letter received from Mr. Birdofredom Sawin, “a yung feller of our town that was cussed fool enuff to goe atrottin inter Miss Chiff arter a dram and fife,” and who finds when he gets to Mexico that

  “This kind o’ sogerin’ aint a mite like our October trainin’.”

Of the subsequent papers the best was, perhaps, What Mr. Robinson Thinks, an election ballad, which caused universal laughter, and was on every body’s tongue.