Excerpt from The Biglow Papers Lowell was one of a remarkable circle of literary friends, such as has hardly existed before in all his tory, and certainly never in the United States. His friendships included Longfellow, Emerson, R. H. Dana, W. W. Story, Fields, Holmes, Whittier, Agas siz, E. E. Hale, and others of nearly equal prominence. Such friendship greatly enriched his life, but it in no wise quenched his originality nor weakened his vigor. In looking over his poetical works for a critical esti mate, we find no one poem which towers up above the rest, like Milton's Paradise Lost, Byron's Childe Harold, or Wordsworth's Excursion. But there are many shorter ones, each of which is sufficient to justify the high reputation which he holds on both sides of the Atlantic. In his first published volume, there is one, entitled Ode, which must have been written when he was little more than a boy, which gave abun dant evidence of his high aspiration and of the earnest ness of his spirit. His admirers were justified in predicting from this poem a brilliant future for the author, and the result was not disappointing. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.