“Wut’s words to them whose faith an’ truth
    On war’s red techstone rang true metal,
  Who ventered life an’ love an’ youth
    For the gret prize o’ death in battle? 
  To him who, deadly hurt, agen
    Flashed on afore the charge’s thunder,
  Tippin’ with fire the bolt of men
    That rived the rebel line asunder?”

Charles Sumner, a somewhat heavy person, with little sense of humor, wished that the author of the Biglow Papers “could have used good English.”  In the lines just quoted, indeed, the bad English adds nothing to the effect.  In 1848 Lowell wrote A Fable for Critics, something after the style of Sir John Suckling’s Session of the Poets; a piece of rollicking doggerel in which he surveyed the American Parnassus, scattering about headlong fun, sharp satire, and sound criticism in equal proportion.  Never an industrious workman, like Longfellow, at the poetic craft, but preferring to wait for the mood to seize him, he allowed eighteen years to go by, from 1850 to 1868, before publishing another volume of verse.  In the latter year appeared Under the Willows, which contains some of his ripest and most perfect work, notably A Winter Evening Hymn to my Fire, with its noble and touching close—­suggested by, perhaps, at any rate recalling, the dedication of Goethe’s Faust,

  “Ihr naht euch wieder, schwankende Gestalten;”

the subtle Footpath and In the Twilight, the lovely little poems Auf Wiedersehen and After the Funeral, and a number of spirited political pieces, such as Villa Franca and the Washers of the Shroud.  This volume contained also his Ode Recited at the Harvard Commemoration in 1865.  This, although uneven, is one of the finest occasional poems in the language, and the most important contribution which our civil war has made to song.  It was charged with the grave emotion of one who not only shared the patriotic grief and exultation of his alma mater in the sacrifice of her sons, but who felt a more personal sorrow in the loss of kindred of his own, fallen in the front of battle.  Particularly note-worthy in this memorial ode are the tribute to Abraham Lincoln, the third strophe beginning, “Many loved Truth;” the exordium, “O Beautiful! my Country! ours once more!” and the close of the eighth strophe, where the poet chants of the youthful heroes who

        “Come transfigured back,
  Secure from change in their high-hearted ways,
  Beautiful evermore and with the rays
  Of morn on their white Shields of Expectation.”