New Letters of James Russell Lowell, Ed
by
[Harpers, $4.00]
ONE wishes that Mr. Howe were the first rather than the last of Lowell’s editors, for one’s impressions of both his judgment and his appreciation are amply confirmed by this volume. But, with every washing of the sands, pay dirt in Lowell’s letters grows scarcer, and even an accomplished prospector can hardly be expected to make a strike. Two letters Mr. Howe has turned up (one on Harvard architecture, which we recommend to the appropriate authorities, and one on the capacities of young Charles Eliot, which historians should not neglect) that put in a nutshell both the breadth of Lowell’s imagination and its sharp limitations. Most of the letters, however, the bulk of them written to his daughter, manifest, though in rather a charming way, the usual paternal solicitudes or express to familiars the satisfactions of friendship.
This volume does not alter the familiar portrait by a whisker, but it makes pleasant reading for the literarily inclined when nothing of great consequence is apt to disturb their leisure.
A. B.