The Biglow Papers remain Lowell’s most original contribution to American literature.  They are, all in all, the best political satires in the language, and unequaled as portraitures of the Yankee character, with its cuteness, its homely wit, and its latent poetry.  Under the racy humor of the dialect—­which became in Lowell’s hands a medium of literary expression almost as effective as Burns’s Ayrshire Scotch—­burned that moral enthusiasm and that hatred of wrong and deification of duty—­“Stern daughter of the voice of God”—­which, in the tough New England stock, stands instead of the passion in the blood of southern races.  Lowell’s serious poems on political questions, such as the Present Crisis, Ode to Freedom, and the Capture of Fugitive Slaves, have the old Puritan fervor, and such lines as

  “They are slaves who dare not be
  In the right with two or three,”

and the passage beginning

  “Truth forever on the scaffold, Wrong forever on the throne,”

became watchwords in the struggle against slavery and disunion.  Some of these were published in his volume of 1848 and the collected edition of his poems, in two volumes, issued in 1850.  These also included his most ambitious narrative poem, the Vision of Sir Launfal, an allegorical and spiritual treatment of one of the legends of the Holy Grail.  Lowell’s genius was not epical, but lyric and didactic.  The merit of Sir Launfal is not in the telling of the story, but in the beautiful descriptive episodes, one of which, commencing,

  “And what is so rare as a day in June? 
  Then if ever come perfect days,”

is as current as any thing that he has written.  It is significant of the lack of a natural impulse toward narrative invention in Lowell that, unlike Longfellow and Holmes, he never tried his hand at a novel.  One of the most important parts of a novelist’s equipment he certainly possesses, namely, an insight into character and an ability to delineate it.  This gift is seen especially in his sketch of Parson Wilbur, who edited the Biglow Papers with a delightfully pedantic introduction, glossary, and notes; in the prose essay On a Certain Condescension in Foreigners, and in the uncompleted poem, Fitz Adam’s Story.  See also the sketch of Captain Underhill in the essay on New England Two Centuries Ago.

The Biglow Papers when brought out in a volume were prefaced by imaginary notices of the press, including a capital parody of Carlyle, and a reprint from the “Jaalam Independent Blunderbuss,” of the first sketch—­afterward amplified and enriched—­of that perfect Yankee idyl, The Courtin’.  Between 1862 and 1865 a second series of Biglow Papers appeared, called out by the events of the civil war.  Some of these, as, for instance, Jonathan to John, a remonstrance with England for her unfriendly attitude toward the North, were not inferior to any thing in the earlier series; and others were even superior as poems, equal, indeed, in pathos and intensity to any thing that Lowell has written in his professedly serious verse.  In such passages the dialect wears rather thin, and there is a certain incongruity between the rustic spelling and the vivid beauty and power and the figurative cast of the phrase in stanzas like the following: