It was in 1848 that, under the influence of disgust
at the Mexican War, and the unprincipled motives which led so many to support it, he began the " Biglow Papers," which will im- mortalise his name in the eyes of Englishmen and Americans. His serious poetry was good, with a slightly conventional flavour of idealistic sentiment in it ; but it was in the poetry of humour, satire, political scorn, that he touched his highest point; indeed, a point which makes him an original force in our literature. "John P. Robinson, he" who said, "they didn't know everything down in Judee," was almost a pro- phetic forecast of an age in which prophecy was about to be depreciated by shrewd worldly cunning ; and his picture of Birdofredum Sawin, who, when asked by the Negro to show him the Pole Star that he might escape to Canada, proceeded to do so in the following fashion,— " So wheelin' round about sou'-west, and looking up a bit, Picked out a middlin%shiny one, and told him that were it," will be accepted as an immortal delineation of the grasping and worldly but cool and cunning Yankee, who kept his presence of mind as undisturbed in danger as he kept his selfishness undiluted by any disinterested passion. Mr. Lowell's genius is one of the brightest, if not the brightest star in the literature of the United. States.
