Elmwood
About half a mile from the Craigie House in Cambridge, Massachusetts,
on the road leading to the old town of Watertown, is Elmwood, a
spacious square house set amongst lilac and syringa bushes, and
overtopped by elms. Pleasant fields are on either side, and from the
windows one may look out on the Charles River winding its way among
the marshes. The house itself is one of a group which before the war
for independence belonged to Boston merchants and officers of the
crown who refused to take the side of the revolutionary party. Tory
Row was the name given to the broad winding road on which the houses
stood. Great farms and gardens were attached to them, and some sign of
their roomy ease still remains. The estates fell into the hands of
various persons after the war, and in process of time Longfellow came
to occupy Craigie House. Elmwood at that time was the property of the
Reverend Charles Lowell, minister of the West Church in Boston, and
when Longfellow thus became his neighbor, James Russell Lowell was a
junior in Harvard College. He was born at Elmwood, February 22, 1819.
Any one who will read _An Indian Summer Reverie_ will discover how
affectionately Lowell dwelt on the scenes of nature and life amidst
which he grew up. Indeed, it would be a pleasant task to draw from the
full storehouse of his poetry the golden phrases with which he
characterizes the trees, meadows, brooks, flowers, birds, and human
companions that were so near to him in his youth and so vivid in his
recollection. In his prose works also a lively paper, _Cambridge
Thirty Years Ago_, contains many reminiscences of his early life.
To know any one well it is needful to inquire into his ancestry, and
two or three hints may be given of the currents that met in this poet.
On his father's side he came from a succession of New England men who
for the previous three generations had been in professional life. The
Lowells traced their descent from Percival Lowell,--a name which
survives in the family,--of Bristol, England, who settled in Newbury,
Massachusetts, in 1639. The great-grandfather was a minister in
Newburyport, one of those, as Dr. Hale says, "who preached sermons
when young men went out to fight the French, and preached sermons
again in memory of their death when they had been slain in battle."
The grandfather was John Lowell, a member of the Constitutional
Convention of Massachusetts in 1780. It was he who introduced into the
Bill of Rights a phrase from the Bill of Rights of Virginia, "All men
are created free and equal," with the purpose which it effected of
setting free every man then held as a slave in Massachusetts. A son of
John Lowell and brother of the Rev. Charles Lowell was Francis Cabot
Lowell, who gave a great impetus to New England manufactures, and from
whom the city of Lowell took its name. Another son, and thus also an
uncle of the poet, was John Lowell, Jr., whose wise and far-sighted
provision gave to Boston that powerful centre of intellectual
influence, the Lowell Institute. Of the Rev. Charles Lowell, his son
said, in a letter written in 1844, "He is Doctor Primrose in the
comparative degree, the very simplest and charmingest of
sexagenarians, and not without a great deal of the truest
magnanimity." It was characteristic of Lowell thus to go to _The Vicar
of Wakefield_ for a portrait of his father. Dr. Lowell lived till
1861, when his son was forty-two.
[Illustration: Elmwood, Mr. Lowell's home in Cambridge.]
Mrs. Harriet Spence Lowell, the poet's mother, was of Scotch origin, a
native of Portsmouth, New Hampshire. She is described as having "a
great memory, an extraordinary aptitude for language, and a passionate
fondness for ancient songs and ballads." It pleased her to fancy
herself descended from the hero of one of the most famous ballads, Sir
Patrick Spens, and at any rate she made a genuine link in the Poetic
Succession. In a letter to his mother, written in 1837, Lowell says:
"I am engaged in several poetical effusions, one of which I have
dedicated to you, who have always been the patron and encourager of my
youthful muse." The Russell in his name seems to intimate a strain of
Jewish ancestry; at any rate Lowell took pride in the name on this
account, for he was not slow to recognize the intellectual power of
the Hebrew race. He was the youngest of a family of five, two
daughters and three sons. An older brother who outlived him a short
time, was the Rev. Robert Traill Spence Lowell, who wrote besides a
novel, _The New Priest in Conception Bay_, which contains a delightful
study of a Yankee, some poems, and a story of school-boy life.
Not long before his death, Lowell wrote to an English friend a
description of Elmwood, and as he was very fond of the house in which
he lived and died, it is agreeable to read words which strove to set
it before the eyes of one who had never seen it. "'Tis a pleasant old
house, just about twice as old as I am, four miles from Boston, in
what was once the country and is now a populous suburb. But it still
has some ten acres of open about it, and some fine old trees. When the
worst comes to the worst (if I live so long) I shall still have four
and a half acres left with the house, the rest belonging to my
brothers and sisters or their heirs. It is a square house, with four
rooms on a floor, like some houses of the Georgian era I have seen in
English provincial towns, only they are of brick, and this is of wood.
But it is solid with its heavy oaken beams, the spaces between which
in the four outer walls are filled in with brick, though you mustn't
fancy a brick-and-timber house, for outwardly it is sheathed with
wood. Inside there is much wainscot (of deal) painted white in the
fashion of the time when it was built. It is very sunny, the sun
rising so as to shine (at an acute angle to be sure) through the
northern windows, and going round the other three sides in the course
of the day. There is a pretty staircase with the quaint old twisted
banisters,--which they call balusters now; but mine are banisters. My
library occupies two rooms opening into each other by arches at the
sides of the ample chimneys. The trees I look out on are the earliest
things I remember. There you have me in my new-old quarters. But you
must not fancy a large house--rooms sixteen feet square, and on the
ground floor, nine high. It was large, as things went here, when it
was built, and has a certain air of amplitude about it as from some
inward sense of dignity." In an earlier letter he wrote: "Here I am in
my garret. I slept here when I was a little curly-headed boy, and used
to see visions between me and the ceiling, and dream the so often
recurring dream of having the earth put into my hand like an orange.
In it I used to be shut up without a lamp,--my mother saying that none
of her children should be afraid of the dark,--to hide my head under
the pillow, and then not be able to shut out the shapeless monsters
that thronged around me, minted in my brain.... In winter my view is a
wide one, taking in a part of Boston. I can see one long curve of the
Charles and the wide fields between me and Cambridge, and the flat
marshes beyond the river, smooth and silent with glittering snow. As
the spring advances and one after another of our trees puts forth, the
landscape is cut off from me piece by piece, till, by the end of May,
I am closeted in a cool and rustling privacy of leaves." In two of his
papers especially, _My Garden Acquaintance_ and _A Good Word for
Winter_, has Lowell given glimpses of the out-door life in the midst
of which he grew up.