Page:Harper's New Monthly Magazine - v109.djvu/324

298 of the characters of Hawthorne and Holmes and Whittier. Consider, for example, the cleverness of the portrait of Poe, and note that the criticism is really just, in spite of the crackling of epigram:

And the sketch of Bryant, with all the ingenuity of its punning and all the artificiality of its rhyming, is not a caricature, but a true portrait:

Although he was dealing solely with the literature of his own country, Lowell has ever a cosmopolitan point of view, while still keeping his feet firm on his native soil. He was never either provincial in self-assertion or colonial in self-abasement. No one had higher ideals for America; and no one was prompter to see the absurdity of hasty assertions that these ideals had already been attained. He refused absolutely to see a Swan of Avon in any of our wild geese. He laughed to scorn the suggestion that we ought to have great poets of our own merely because of the vastness of the country. He had a healthy detestation of that confession of inferiority which consists in calling Irving the "American Goldsmith," and Cooper the "American Scott." It was this youthful foible—feebler now than it was when the "Fable" was written, but not yet quite dead—that Lowell girded against in one of his most brilliant passages:

This same foible we find animad-