American ideas for English readers

Among his many titles to the special consideration and gratitude of his countrymen, James Russell Lowell had one in pre-eminence—an unyielding loyalty to all that was best in American ideas and aims. It was this quality that gave point to the wit of Hosea Biglow, and loftiness to his imagination in his more serious poems. In the earliest of the Biglow papers, he calls upon Massachusetts to

“Hold up a beacon peerlessTo the oppressed of all the World,”and the tone is not changed to his very latest utterance. In that Commemoration Ode, which will remain the crown of his literary and poetical work, his passion found its highest expression: