If he be a nobler lover, take him!
You in you I seek, and not myself;
Love with men's what women choose to
make him,

Seraph strong to soar, or fawn-eyed elf: All I am or can, your beauty gave it,

Lifting me a moment nigh to you,

And my bit of heaven, I fain would save it

Mine I thought it was, I never knew.

What you take of me is yours to serve you,

All I give, you gave to me before; Let him win you! If I but deserve you, I keep all you grant to him and more: You shall make me dare what others dare not,

You shall keep my nature pure as snow, And a light from you that others share

not

Shall transfigure me where'er I go.

Let me be your thrall! However lowly Be the bondsman's service I can do, Loyalty shall make it high and holy; Naught can be unworthy, done for you.

Such an icy

Women say,

sion,

mistress well beseems." "Could we deserve such pas

We might be the marvel that he dreams."

ON HEARING A SONATA OF BEETHOVEN'S PLAYED IN THE NEXT ROOM

UNSEEN Musician, thou art sure to please, For those same notes in happier days I heard

Poured by dear hands that long have never stirred

Yet now again for me delight the keys: Ah me, to strong illusions such as these What are Life's solid things? The walls that gird

Our senses, lo, a casual scent or word Levels, and 't is the soul that hears and sees!

Play on, dear girl, and many be the years Ere some grayhaired survivor sit like

me

And, for thy largess pay a meed of tears Unto another who, beyond the sea

Of Time and Change, perhaps not sadly hears

A music in this verse undreamed by thee !

VERSES

INTENDED TO GO WITH A POSSET DISH TO MY DEAR LITTLE GODDAUGHTER, 1882

It is of interest to know that the goddaughter was a child of Leslie Stephen.

IN good old times, which means, you know,
The time men wasted long ago,

And we must blame our brains or mood
If that we squander seems less good,
In those blest days when wish was act
And fancy dreamed itself to fact,
Godfathers used to fill with guineas
The cups they gave their pickaninnies,
Performing functions at the chrism
Not mentioned in the Catechism.
No millioner, poor I fill up
With wishes my more modest cup,
Though had I Amalthea's horn

It should be hers the newly born.
Nay, shudder not! I should bestow it
So brimming full she could n't blow it.
Wishes are n't horses: true, but still
There are worse roadsters than goodwill.
And so I wish my darling health,
And just to round my couplet, wealth,
With faith enough to bridge the chasm
"Twixt Genesis and Protoplasm,
And bear her o'er life's current vext
From this world to a better next,
Where the full glow of God puts out
Poor reason's farthing candle, Doubt.
I've wished her healthy, wealthy, wise,
What more can godfather devise?
But since there's room for countless wishes
In these old-fashioned posset dishes,
I'll wish her from my plenteous store
Of those commodities two more,

Her father's wit, veined through and through

--

With tenderness that Watts (but whew!
Celia's aflame, I mean no stricture
On his Sir Josh-surpassing picture)
I wish her next, and 't is the soul
Of all I've dropt into the bowl,
Her mother's beauty nay, but two
So fair at once would never do.
Then let her but the half possess,
Troy was besieged ten years for less.
Now if there's any truth in Darwin,
And we from what was, all we are win,
I simply wish the child to be
A sample of Heredity,
Enjoying to the full extent

Life's best, the Unearned Increment
Which Fate her Godfather to flout
Gave him in legacies of gout.
Thus, then, the cup is duly filled;
Walk steady, dear, lest all be spilled.

"A similar change is made in the ninth verse of the stanza, where 'simpleness' is substituted for steadfastness.' The change from 'steadfast' to 'simple' was not made, probably through oversight, in the first verse of the second stanza. There is nothing to indicate what epithet Mr. Lowell would have chosen to complete the first verse of the third stanza. C. E. Ñ."

STRONG, simple, silent are the [steadfast] laws

That sway this universe, of none withstood, Unconscious of man's outcries or applause, Or what man deems his evil or his good; And when the Fates ally them with a cause That wallows in the sea-trough and seems lost,

Drifting in danger of the reefs and sands Of shallow counsels, this way, that way, tost,

Strength, silence, simpleness, of these three strands

They twist the cable shall the world hold fast

To where its anchors clutch the bed-rock of the Past.

Strong, simple, silent, therefore such was

he

Who helped us in our need; the eternal law
That who can saddle Opportunity
Is God's elect, though many a mortal flaw
May minish him in eyes that closely see,
Was verified in him: what need we say
Of one who made success where others
failed,

Who, with no light save that of common day,

Struck hard, and still struck on till Fortune quailed,

But that (so sift the Norns) a desperate

van

Ne'er fell at last to one who was not wholly

man.

A face all prose where Time's [benignant] haze

Softens no raw edge yet, nor makes all fair With the beguiling light of vanished days; This is relentless granite, bleak and bare, Roughhewn, and scornful of æsthetic phrase;

Nothing is here for fancy, naught for dreams,

The Present's hard uncompromising light

I. INTRODUCTION TO THE SECOND

SERIES OF BIGLOW PAPERS

[Lowell took occasion, when collecting in a book the several numbers of the second series of "Biglow Papers," which had appeared in the "Atlantic Monthly," to prefix an essay which not only gave a personal narrative of the origin of the whole scheme, but particularly dwelt upon the use in literature of the homely dialect in which the poems were couched. In this Cambridge Edition it has seemed expedient to print the Introduction here rather than in immediate connection with the poems themselves.]

THOUGH prefaces seem of late to have fallen under some reproach, they have at least this advantage, that they set us again on the feet of our personal consciousness and rescue us from the gregarious mock-modesty or cowardice of that we which shrills feebly throughout modern literature like the shrieking of mice in the walls of a house that has passed its prime. Having a few words to say to the many friends whom the "Biglow Papers" have won me, I shall accordingly take the freedom of the first person singular of the personal pronoun. Let each of the good-natured unknown who have cheered me by the written communication of their sympathy look upon this Introduction as a private letter to himself.

When, more than twenty years ago, I wrote the first of the series, I had no definite plan and no intention of ever writing another. Thinking the Mexican war, as I think it still, a national crime committed in behoof of Slavery, our common sin, and wishing to put the feeling of those who thought as I did in a way that would tell, I imagined to myself such an upcountry man as I had often seen at antislavery gatherings, capable of district-school English, but always instinctively falling back into the natural stronghold of his homely dialect when heated to the point of self-forgetfulness. When I began to carry out my conception and to write in my assumed character, I found myself in a strait between two perils. On the one hand, I was in danger of being carried beyond the limit of my own opinions, or at least of that temper with which every man should speak his mind in print, and on the other I feared the risk of seeming to vulgarize a deep and sacred conviction. I needed on occasion to rise above the level of mere patois, and for this purpose conceived the Rev. Mr. Wilbur, who should express the more cautious element of the New England character and its pedantry, as Mr.

The

Biglow should serve for its homely commonsense vivified and heated by conscience. parson was to be the complement rather than the antithesis of his parishioner, and I felt or fancied a certain humorous element in the real identity of the two under a seeming incongruity. Mr. Wilbur's fondness for scraps of Latin, though drawn from the life, I adopted deliberately to heighten the contrast. Finding soon after that I needed some one as a mouthpiece of the mere drollery, for I conceive that true humor is never divorced from moral conviction, I invented Mr. Sawin for the clown of my little puppet-show. I meant to embody in him that half-conscious unmorality which I had noticed as the recoil in gross natures from a puritanism that still strove to keep in its creed the intense savor which had long gone out of its faith and life. In the three I thought I should find room enough to express, as it was my plan to do, the popular feeling and opinion of the time. For the names of two of my characters, since I have received some remonstrances from very worthy persons who happen to bear them, I would say that they were purely fortuitous, probably mere unconscious memories of signboards or directories. Mr. Sawin's sprang from the accident of a rhyme at the end of his first epistle, and I purposely christened him by the impossible surname of Birdofredum not more to stigmatize him as the incarnation of "Manifest Destiny," in other words, of national recklessness as to right and wrong, than to avoid the chance of wounding any private sensitiveness.

The success of my experiment soon began not only to astonish me, but to make me feel the responsibility of knowing that I held in my hand a weapon instead of the mere fencingstick I had supposed. Very far from being a popular author under my own name, so far, indeed, as to be almost unread, I found the verses of my pseudonym copied everywhere; I saw them pinned up in workshops; I heard them quoted and their authorship debated; I once even, when rumor had at length caught up my name in one of its eddies, had the satisfaction of overhearing it demonstrated, in the pauses of a concert, that I was utterly incompetent to have written anything of the kind. I had read too much not to know the utter worthlessness of contemporary reputation, especially as regards satire, but I knew also that by giving a certain amount of influence it also had its worth, if that influence were used on the right side. I had learned, too, that the first requisite of good writing is to have an earnest and definite purpose, whether æsthetic