English Poets (Barnes & Noble Digital Library)

Lowell begins this volume of essays with a charming “Apology for a Preface.” The bulk of the book discusses English poets:  Edmund Spenser, William Shakespeare, John Milton, William Wordsworth, and John Keats. The author then turns his eye to the German writer Gotthold Ephraim Lessing as well as French-born Jean-Jacques Rousseau and the Sentimentalists.