The depth of feeling which appears in his prose at this time, as he tries to set forth the essential character of the great conflict, could scarcely fail to find manifestation in poetry, since that was his native speech. Yet it required genuine possession of mind. In the years just preceding the actual breaking out of war Lowell could, as we have seen, treat with badinage such manifestations as the American Tract Society, and the speech-making of Choate and Cushing; he could, indeed, pass in these papers from satire to earnest examination of fundamentals; but somehow he could not bring himself to use the keener weapon which he had handled so skilfully in the discussion over Texas and the Mexican War. “Friendly people say to me sometimes,” he writes to Thomas Hughes, 13 September, 1859, “‘write us more “Biglow Papers,”’ and I have even been simple enough to try, only to find that I could not.” And a couple of months later R. G. White writes: “The _Atlantic_ has just come in, and I miss what you led me to expect from your friend B. O. F. Sawin.” He had plainly made a deliberate attempt, for in July of this year he was writing to Mr. Norton: “I have a new ‘Biglow’ running in my head, and I shall write it as soon as my brain clears off. At present I feel all the time like the next morning without having had the day before, which is too bad. I _think_ my new ‘Biglow’ will be funny. If not you will never see it. It will be on the reopening of the slave trade, and some rather humorous combinations have come into my mind. We shall see.”
It is not improbable that the impetus to verse came from the stirring of his personal emotions in the autumn of 1861, when he was following with anxious yet proud emotions the career of the two nephews whom he loved with that freedom which an uncle bestows on those who, not his own children, are yet his children’s nearest kin. It was on 20 September that he wrote of the “constant state of _un_pleasurable excitement” under which he labored. On 8 October he writes to Mr. Fields, who had been urging him to send a contribution to the _Atlantic_: “I set about a poem last night,--_apropos_ of the times,--and hope to finish it to-morrow, and if it turn out to be good for anything, I will send it at once, and you can print it or no as you like.”