I stood on the hill just before you enter the village, the stillness of the fields around me was delicious, broken only by the tinkle of a little brook which runs too swiftly for Frost to catch it.  My picture of the brook in Sir Launfal was drawn from it.  But why do I send you this description,—­like the bones of a chicken I had picked?  Simply because I was so happy as I stood there, and felt so sure of doing something that would justify my friends.  But why do I not say that I have done something?  I believe that I have done better than the world knows yet; but the past seems so little compared with the future....  I am the first poet who has endeavored to express the American Idea, and I shall be popular by and by.”

It is not very likely that Lowell was thinking of Sir Launfal when he wrote this last sentence, yet it is not straining language too far to say that when he took up an Arthurian story he had a different attitude toward the whole cycle of legends from that of Tennyson, who had lately been reviving the legends for the pleasure of English-reading people.  The exuberance of the poet as he carols of June in the prelude to Part First is an expression of the joyous spring which was in the veins of the young American, glad in the sense of freedom and hope.  As Tennyson threw into his retelling of Arthurian romance a moral sense, so Lowell, also a moralist in his poetic apprehension, made a parable of his tale, and, in the broadest interpretation of democracy, sang of the leveling of all ranks in a common divine humanity.  There is a subterranean passage connecting the Biglow Papers with Sir Launfal; it is the holy zeal which attacks slavery issuing in this fable of a beautiful charity, Christ in the guise of a beggar.

The invention is a very simple one, and appears to have been suggested by Tennyson’s Sir Galahad, though Lowell had no doubt read Sir Thomas Malory’s Morte d’Arthur.  The following is the note which accompanied The Vision when first published in 1848, and retained by Lowell in all subsequent editions:—­

“According to the mythology of the Romancers, the San Greal, or Holy Grail, was the cup out of which Jesus Christ partook of the last supper with his disciples.  It was brought into England by Joseph of Arimathea, and remained there, an object of pilgrimage and adoration, for many years in the keeping of his lineal descendants.  It was incumbent upon those who had charge of it to be chaste in thought, word, and deed; but, one of the keepers having broken this condition, the Holy Grail disappeared.  From that time it was a favorite enterprise of the Knights of Arthur’s court to go in search of it.  Sir Galahad was at last successful in finding it, as may be read in the seventeenth book of the Romance of King Arthur.  Tennyson has made Sir Galahad the subject of one of the most exquisite of his poems.

“The plot (if I may give that