Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Olde Cambridge

Professor Norton has left on record the perfect frankness with which Lowell and himself criticised the final revision of Longfellow's Dante, “with a freedom that was made perfect” by the absolute modesty of the author.¹ As between Holmes and Lowell, those who think that mutual admiration went too far, and became flattery, would do well to read and digest the letters of Holmes to Lowell as published in the “Life and letters” ² of the former, and see how utterly frank was their intercourse from the beginning, and how keenly Holmes recognized, for instance, the weak points not merely of the “Fable for critics,” but of the “Vision of Sir Launfal.” No contemporary critic, perhaps, insisted with such fearless justice on the incongruities which form the very basis of that otherwise charming work-“the picture part of the poem” being “Yankee in its ”