-- æsthetically elect. In each soul there lurks some seed of poetry, a seed that quickens responsive to the warm influence of the true poet. It is for us to bring these seeds to this sunlight, to develop, with unabashed idealism, a human tendency that may defeat the material greed that endangers modern life, to arouse the divine discontent that looks beyond the partial, which is, to the perfect, which may be. H. B. INTRODUCTION THE POET AND HIS SURROUNDINGS OF American poets Lowell is one of the most American. Wiser than the eccentric Whitman, wiser than our writers of Columbiads and epics of the red Indian, Lowell saw that the real American is not a new being, cut off from the literary tradition of the past. The American is the Englishman in a new world. He has brought with him the language, the traditions, the mental characteristics, the instincts of his ancestors; and he has modified these in accordance with his new environment. He has carried the old life into a new land, and the result, though with something of a "sea-change," is not wholly "new or strange." Lowell stands, aggressively, perhaps, for the American of English descent, for the American whose "forbears" left England to carry on in a new country the spirit of the old. Few of our poets have studied with greater diligence the models of the past. Few have turned their eyes with such painstaking fidelity to the life about us. For Lowell's world is not conventional, |