g._ "The foolish and the dead alone never change
their opinion." A pun, digression, or out-of-the-way allusion may
occasionally provoke readers, but onlookers have frequently noticed that
few wrinkle their brows while reading his critical essays, and that a
pleased expression, such as photographers like, is almost certain to
appear. He has the rare faculty of making his readers think hard enough for
agreeable exercise, and yet he spares them undue fatigue and rarely takes
them among miry bogs or through sandy deserts.
Lowell's versatility is a striking characteristic. He was a poet, reformer,
college professor, editor, literary critic, diplomatist, speaker, and
writer on political subjects. We feel that he sometimes narrowly escaped
being a genius, and that he might have crossed the boundary line into
genius-land, if he had confined his attention to one department of
literature and had been willing to write at less breakneck speed, taking
time and thought to prune, revise, and suppress more of his productions.
Not a few, however, think that Lowell, in spite of his defects, has left
the impress of genius on some of his work. When his sonnet, _Our Love is
not a Fading Earthly Flower_, was read to a cultured group, some who did
not recognize the authorship of the verses thought that they were
Shakespeare's.
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