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Updated: May 13, 2025
As a writer he had shown himself to be elegantly schooled, but in the Fable for Critics and the Biglow Papers, he had burst forth as a most effective and slashing satirist. His culture was closely and perfectly fitted, but when scratched, revealing in full proportions the "Whang-doodle" Yankee.
A Briton should not take unkindly assertions of independence, even such ruffled independence as Lowell expressed in "The Biglow Papers": I guess the Lord druv down Creation's spiles 'Thout no gret helpin' from the British Isles, An' could contrive to keep things pooty stiff Ef they withdrawed from business in a miff; I han't no patience with such swelling fellers ez Think God can't forge 'thout them to blow the bellerses.
He went to Europe again to prepare himself, and after entering upon his work as a teacher made a happy second marriage, served for four years as the first editor of "The Atlantic," and helped his friend Charles Eliot Norton edit "The North American Review." The Civil War inspired a second series of "Biglow Papers" and the magnificent "Commemoration Ode" of 1865.
That the habits of our people are too cool, cautious, undemonstrative, to furnish the warp and woof of song and pastoral, and that their dialect and figures of speech, however richly significant and expressive in the autobiography of Sam Slick, or the satire of Hosea Biglow and Ethan Spike, form a very awkward medium of sentiment and pathos? All this may be true.
Garrison, Phillips, Gerrit Smith, Sumner, and Seward aroused the anti-slavery forces as never before, and the ``Biglow Papers'' of James Russell Lowell, which made Northern pro-slavery men ridiculous, were read with more zest than ever. But the abolition forces had the defects of their qualities, and their main difficulty really arose from the stimulus given to a thin fanaticism.
But a proud sense of single nationality had soon become prevalent in both, and in the North nothing whatever had happened to set back this growth, for the idea which Lowell had once attributed to his Hosea Biglow of abjuring Union with slave owners was a negligible force.
For the sake of these he had been willing to suffer the reproach which followed their friends in the earlier days of the anti-slavery struggle: He had outlived the reproach long before; but the fear of his strength remained with those who had felt it, and he had not made himself more generally loved by the 'Fable for Critics' than by the 'Biglow Papers', probably.
After leaving the school of Dame Prentiss, best remembered by infantine loves, those pretty preludes of more serious passions; by the great forfeit-basket, filled with its miscellaneous waifs and deodauds, and by the long willow stick by the aid of which the good old body, now stricken in years and unwieldy in person could stimulate the sluggish faculties or check the mischievous sallies of the child most distant from his ample chair, a school where I think my most noted schoolmate was the present Bishop of Delaware, became the pupil of Master William Biglow.
But the mind has its necessities as well as the body; and we hope and pray that the human intellect may never be so busy in materialistic inventions that it cannot give us an "Ode to Duty," and a "Happy Warrior," a "Snow Bound," and a "Thanatopsis," an "Evangeline" and a "Chambered Nautilus," a "Pippa Passes" or a "Biglow Papers," an "In Memoriam" or a "Locksley Hall."
Even Lowell, in the later Biglow Papers, which pleaded with deeper pathos and power than before for freedom even he could write of "hoisting your captain's heart up with a derrick." Wendell Phillips on one occasion, impatient of Lincoln's attitude toward the fugitive slave law, called him "the slave-hound from Illinois."
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