From 1857 to 1862 Lowell edited the Atlantic Monthly, and from 1863 to 1872 the North American Review.  His prose, beginning with an early volume of Conversations on Some of the Old Poets, 1844, has consisted mainly of critical essays on individual writers, such as Dante, Chaucer, Spenser, Emerson, Shakespeare, Thoreau, Pope, Carlyle, etc., together with papers of a more miscellaneous kind, like Witchcraft, New England Two Centuries Ago, My Garden Acquaintance, A Good Word for Winter, Abraham Lincoln, etc., etc.  Two volumes of these were published in 1870 and 1876, under the title Among My Books, and another, My Study Windows, in 1871.  As a literary critic Lowell ranks easily among the first of living writers.  His scholarship is thorough, his judgment keen, and he pours out upon his page an unwithholding wealth of knowledge, humor, wit, and imagination from the fullness of an overflowing mind.  His prose has not the chastened correctness and “low tone” of Matthew Arnold’s.  It is rich, exuberant, and, sometimes overfanciful, running away into excesses of allusion or following the lead of a chance pun so as sometimes to lay itself open to the charge of pedantry and bad taste.  Lowell’s resources in the way of illustration and comparison are endless, and the readiness of his wit and his delight in using it put many temptations in his way.  Purists in style accordingly take offense at his saying that “Milton is the only man who ever got much poetry out of a cataract, and that was a cataract in his eye,” or of his speaking of “a gentleman for whom the bottle before him reversed the wonder of the stereoscope and substituted the Gascon v for the b in binocular,” which is certainly a puzzling and roundabout fashion of telling us that he had drunk so much that he saw double.  The critics also find fault with his coining such words as “undisprivacied,” and with his writing such lines as the famous one—­from The Cathedral, 1870—­

  “Spume-sliding down the baffled decuman.”

It must be acknowledged that his style lacks the crowning grace of simplicity, but it is precisely by reason of its allusive quality that scholarly readers take pleasure in it.  They like a diction that has stuff in it and is woven thick, and where a thing is said in such a way as to recall many other things.

Mention should be made, in connection with this Cambridge circle, of one writer who touched its circumference briefly.  This was Sylvester Judd, a graduate of Yale, who entered the Harvard Divinity School in 1837, and in 1840 became minister of a Unitarian church in Augusta, Maine.  Judd published several books, but the only one of them at all rememberable was Margaret, 1845, a novel of which, Lowell said, in A Fable for Critics, that it was “the first Yankee book with the soul of Down East in it.”  It was very imperfect in point of art, and its second part—­a rhapsodical description of a sort of Unitarian Utopia—­is quite unreadable.  But in the delineation of the few chief characters and of the rude, wild life of an outlying New England township just after the close of the Revolutionary War, as well as in the tragic power of the catastrophe, there was genius of a high order.