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LIFE OF LOWELL

James Russell Lowell

In Cambridge there are two literary shrines to which visitors are sure

to find their way soon after passing the Harvard gates, "Craigie

House," the home of Longfellow and "Elmwood," the home of Lowell.

Though their hallowed retirement has been profaned by the

encroachments of the growing city, yet in their simple dignity these

fine old colonial mansions still bespeak the noble associations of the

past, and stand as memorials of the finest products of American

culture.

 

Elmwood was built before the Revolution by Thomas Oliver, the Tory

governor, who signed his abdication at the invitation of a committee

of "about four thousand people" who surrounded his house at Cambridge.

The property was confiscated by the Commonwealth and used by the

American army during the war. In 1818 it was purchased by the Rev.

Charles Lowell, pastor of the West Congregational Church in Boston,

and after ninety years it is still the family home. Here was born,

February 22, 1819, James Russell Lowell, with surroundings most

propitious for the nurturing of a poet-soul. Within the stately home

there was a refined family life; the father had profited by the

unusual privilege of three years' study abroad, and his library of

some four thousand volumes was not limited to theology; the mother,

whose maiden name was Spence and who traced her Scotch ancestry back

to the hero of the ballad of _Sir Patrick Spens_, taught her children

the good old ballads and the romantic stories in the _Fairie Queen_,

and it was one of the poet's earliest delights to recount the

adventures of Spenser's heroes and heroines to his playmates.

 

An equally important influence upon his early youth was the

out-of-door life at Elmwood. To the love of nature his soul was early

dedicated, and no American poet has more truthfully and beautifully

interpreted the inspired teachings of nature, whispered through the

solemn tree-tops or caroled by the happy birds. The open fields

surrounding Elmwood and the farms for miles around were his familiar

playground, and furnished daily adventures for his curious and eager

mind. The mere delight of this experience with nature, he says, "made

my childhood the richest part of my life. It seems to me as if I had

never seen nature again since those old days when the balancing of a

yellow butterfly over a thistle bloom was spiritual food and lodging

for a whole forenoon." In the _Cathedral_ is an autobiographic passage

describing in a series of charming pictures some of those choice hours

of childhood:

 

"One summer hour abides, what time I perched,

Dappled with noonday, under simmering leaves,

And pulled the pulpy oxhearts, while aloof

An oriole clattered and the robins shrilled,

Denouncing me an alien and a thief."

 

Quite like other boys Lowell was subjected to the processes of the

more formal education of books. He was first sent to a "dame school,"

and then to the private school of William Wells, under whose rigid

tuition he became thoroughly grounded in the classics. Among his

schoolfellows was W.W. Story, the poet-sculptor, who continued his

life-long friend. Thomas Wentworth Higginson, who was one of the

younger boys of the school, recalls the high talk of Story and Lowell

about the _Fairie Queen_. At fifteen he entered Harvard College, then

an institution with about two hundred students. The course of study

in those days was narrow and dull, a pretty steady diet of Greek,

Latin and Mathematics, with an occasional dessert of Paley's

_Evidences of Christianity_ or Butler's _Analogy_. Lowell was not

distinguished for scholarship, but he read omnivorously and wrote

copiously, often in smooth flowing verse, fashioned after the accepted

English models of the period. He was an editor of _Harvardiana_, the

college magazine, and was elected class poet in his senior year. But

his habit of lounging with the poets in the secluded alcoves of the

old library, in preference to attending recitations, finally became

too scandalous for official forbearance, and he was rusticated, "on

account of constant neglect of his college duties," as the faculty

records state. He was sent to Concord, where his exile was not without

mitigating profit, as he became acquainted with Emerson and Thoreau.

Here he wrote the class poem, which he was permitted to circulate in

print at his Commencement. This production, which now stands at the

head of the list of his published works, was curiously unprophetic of

his later tendencies. It was written in the neatly, polished couplets

of the Pope type and other imitative metres, and aimed to satirize the

radical movements of the period, especially the transcendentalists and

abolitionists, with both of whom he was soon to be in active sympathy.

 

Lowell's first two years out of college were troubled with rather more

than the usual doubts and questionings that attend a young man's

choice of a profession. He studied for a bachelor's degree in law,

which he obtained in two years. But the work was done reluctantly. Law

books, he says, "I am reading with as few wry faces as I may." Though

he was nominally practicing law for two years, there is no evidence

that he ever had a client, except the fictitious one so pleasantly

described in his first magazine article, entitled _My First Client_.

From Coke and Blackstone his mind would inevitably slip away to hold

more congenial communion with the poets. He became intensely

interested in the old English dramatists, an interest that resulted in

his first series of literary articles, _The Old English Dramatists_,

published in the _Boston Miscellany_. The favor with which these

articles were received increased, he writes, the "hope of being able

one day to support myself by my pen, and to leave a calling which I

hate, and for which I am not _well_ fitted, to say the least."

 

During this struggle between law and literature an influence came into

Lowell's life that settled his purposes, directed his aspirations and

essentially determined his career. In 1839 he writes to a friend about

a "very pleasant young lady," who "knows more poetry than any one I am

acquainted with." This pleasant young lady was Maria White, who became

his wife in 1844. The loves of this young couple constitute one of the

most pleasing episodes in the history of our literature, idyllic in

its simple beauty and inspiring in its spiritual perfectness. "Miss

White was a woman of unusual loveliness," says Mr. Norton, "and of

gifts of mind and heart still more unusual, which enabled her to enter

with complete sympathy into her lover's intellectual life and to

direct his genius to its highest aims." She was herself a poet, and a

little volume of her poems published privately after her death is an

evidence of her refined intellectual gifts and lofty spirit.

 

In 1841 Lowell published his first collection of poems, entitled _A

Year's Life_. The volume was dedicated to "Una," a veiled admission of

indebtedness for its inspiration to Miss White. Two poems

particularly, _Irene_ and _My Love_, and the best in the volume, are

rapturous expressions of his new inspiration. In later years he

referred to the collection as "poor windfalls of unripe experience."

Only nine of the sixty-eight poems were preserved in subsequent

collections. In 1843, with a young friend, Robert Carter, Lowell

launched a new magazine, _The Pioneer_, with the high purpose, as the

prospectus stated, of giving the public "a rational substitute" for

the "namby-pamby love tales and sketches monthly poured out to them by

many of our popular magazines." These young reformers did not know how

strongly the great reading public is attached to its literary

flesh-pots, and so the _Pioneer_ proved itself too good to live in

just three months. The result of the venture to Lowell was an

interesting lesson in editorial work and a debt of eighteen hundred

dollars. His next venture was a second volume of _Poems_, issued in

1844, in which the permanent lines of his poetic development appear

more clearly than in _A Year's Life_. The tone of the first volume was

uniformly serious, but in the second his muse's face begins to

brighten with the occasional play of wit and humor. The volume was

heartily praised by the critics and his reputation as a new poet of

convincing distinction was established. In the following year appeared

_Conversations on Some of the Old Poets_, a volume of literary

criticism interesting now mainly as pointing to maturer work in this

field.

 

It is generally stated that the influence of Maria White made Lowell

an Abolitionist, but this is only qualifiedly true. A year before he

had met her he wrote to a friend: "The Abolitionists are the only ones

with whom I sympathize of the present extant parties." Freedom,

justice, humanitarianism were fundamental to his native idealism.

Maria White's enthusiasm and devotion to the cause served to

crystallize his sentiments and to stimulate him to a practical

participation in the movement. Both wrote for the _Liberty Bell_, an

annual published in the interests of the anti-slavery agitation.

Immediately after their marriage they went to Philadelphia where

Lowell for a time was an editorial writer for the _Pennsylvania

Freeman_, an anti-slavery journal once edited by Whittier. During the

next six years he was a regular contributor to the _Anti-Slavery

Standard_, published in New York. In all of this prose writing Lowell

exhibited the ardent spirit of the reformer, although he never adopted

the extreme views of Garrison and others of the ultra-radical wing of

the party.

 

But Lowell's greatest contribution to the anti-slavery cause was the

_Biglow Papers_, a series of satirical poems in the Yankee dialect,

aimed at the politicians who were responsible for the Mexican War, a

war undertaken, as he believed, in the interests of the Southern

slaveholders. Hitherto the Abolitionists had been regarded with

contempt by the conservative, complacent advocates of peace and

"compromise," and to join them was essentially to lose caste in the

best society. But now a laughing prophet had arisen whose tongue was

tipped with fire. The _Biglow Papers_ was an unexpected blow to the

slave power. Never before had humor been used directly as a weapon in

political warfare. Soon the whole country was ringing with the homely

phrases of Hosea Biglow's satiric humor, and deriding conservatism

began to change countenance. "No speech, no plea, no appeal," says

George William Curtis, "was comparable in popular and permanent effect

with this pitiless tempest of fire and hail, in the form of wit,

argument, satire, knowledge, insight, learning, common-sense, and

patriotism. It was humor of the purest strain, but humor in deadly

earnest." As an embodiment of the elemental Yankee character and

speech it is a classic of final authority. Says Curtis, "Burns did not

give to the Scotch tongue a nobler immortality than Lowell gave to the

dialect of New England."

 

The year 1848 was one of remarkably productive results for Lowell.

Besides the _Biglow Papers_ and some forty magazine articles and

poems, he published a third collection of _Poems_, the _Vision of Sir

Launfal_, and the _Fable for Critics_. The various phases of his

composite genius were nearly all represented in these volumes. The

_Fable_ was a good-natured satire upon his fellow authors, in which he

touched up in rollicking rhymed couplets the merits and weaknesses of

each, not omitting himself, with witty characterization and acute

critical judgment; and it is still read for its delicious humor and

sterling criticism. For example, the lines on Poe will always be

quoted:

 

"There comes Poe, with his raven, like Barnaby Rudge,

Three-fifths of him genius and two-fifths sheer fudge."

 

And so the sketch of Hawthorne:

 

"There is Hawthorne, with genius so shrinking and rare

That you hardly at first see the strength that is there;

A frame so robust, with a nature so sweet,

So earnest, so graceful, so lithe and so fleet,

Is worth a descent from Olympus to meet."

 

Lowell was now living in happy content at Elmwood. His father, whom he

once speaks of as a "Dr. Primrose in the comparative degree," had lost

a large portion of his property, and literary journals in those days

sent very small checks to young authors. So humble frugality was an

attendant upon the high thinking of the poet couple, but this did not

matter, since the richest objects of their ideal world could be had

without price. But clouds suddenly gathered over their beautiful

lives. Four children were born, three of whom died in infancy.

Lowell's deep and lasting grief for his first-born is tenderly

recorded in the poems _She Came and Went_ and the _First Snow-Fall_.

The volume of poems published in 1848 was "reverently dedicated" to

the memory of "our little Blanche," and in the introductory poem

addressed "To M.W.L." he poured forth his sorrow like a libation of

tears:

 

"I thought our love at fall, but I did err;

Joy's wreath drooped o'er mine eyes: I could not see

That sorrow in our happy world must be

Love's deepest spokesman and interpreter."

 

The year 1851-52 was spent abroad for the benefit of Mrs. Lowell's

health, which was now precarious. At Rome their little son Walter

died, and one year after their return to Elmwood sorrow's crown of

sorrow came to the poet in the death of Mrs. Lowell, October, 1853.

For years after the dear old home was to him _The Dead House_, as he

wrote of it:

 

"For it died that autumn morning

When she, its soul, was borne

To lie all dark on the hillside

That looks over woodland and corn."

 

Before 1854 Lowell's literary success had been won mainly in verse.

With the appearance in the magazines of _A Moosehead Journal_,

_Fireside Travels_, and _Leaves from My Italian Journal_ his success

as a prose essayist began. Henceforth, and against his will, his prose

was a stronger literary force than his poetry. He now gave a course of

lectures on the English poets at the Lowell Institute, and during the

progress of these lectures he received notice of his appointment to

succeed Longfellow in the professorship of the French and Spanish

languages and Belles-Lettres in Harvard College. A year was spent in

Europe in preparation for his new work, and during the next twenty

years he faithfully performed the duties of the professorship, pouring

forth the ripening fruits of his varied studies in lectures such as it

is not often the privilege of college students to hear. That pulling

in the yoke of this steady occupation was sometimes galling is shown

in his private letters. To W.D. Howells he wrote regretfully of the

time and energy given to teaching, and of his conviction that he would

have been a better poet if he "had not estranged the muse by donning a

professor's gown." But a good teacher always bears in his left hand

the lamp of sacrifice.

 

In 1857 Lowell was married to Miss Frances Dunlap, "a woman of

remarkable gifts and grace of person and character," says Charles

Eliot Norton. In the same year the _Atlantic Monthly_ was launched and

Lowell became its first editor. This position he held four years.

Under his painstaking and wise management the magazine quickly became

what it has continued to be, the finest representative of true

literature among periodicals. In 1864 he joined his friend, Professor

Norton, in the editorship of the _North American Review_, to which he

gave much of the distinction for which this periodical was once so

worthily famous. In this first appeared his masterly essays on the

great poets, Chaucer, Dante, Shakespeare, Spenser, Milton, Dryden, and

the others, which were gathered into the three volumes, _Among My

Books_, first and second series, and _My Study Windows_. Variety was

given to this critical writing by such charming essays as _A Good Word

for Winter_ and the deliciously caustic paper _On a Certain

Condescension in Foreigners_.

 

One of the strongest elements of Lowell's character was patriotism.

His love of country and his native soil was not merely a principle, it

was a passion. No American author has done so much to enlarge and

exalt the ideals of democracy. An intense interest in the welfare of

the nation broadened the scope of his literary work and led him at

times into active public life. During the Civil War he published a

second series of _Biglow Papers_, in which, says Mr. Greenslet, "we

feel the vital stirring of the mind of Lowell as it was moved by the

great war; and if they never had quite the popular reverberation of

the first series, they made deeper impression, and are a more

priceless possession of our literature." When peace was declared in

April, 1865, he wrote to Professor Norton: "The news, my dear Charles,

is from Heaven. I felt a strange and tender exaltation. I wanted to

laugh and I wanted to cry, and ended by holding my peace and feeling

devoutly thankful. There is something magnificent in having a country

to love." On July 21 a solemn service was held at Harvard College in

memory of her sons who had died in the war, in which Lowell gave the

_Commemoration Ode_, a poem which is now regarded, not as popular, but

as marking the highest reach of his poetic power. The famous passage

characterizing Lincoln is unquestionably the finest tribute ever paid

to Lincoln by an American author.

 

In the presidential campaign of 1876 Lowell was active, making

speeches, serving as delegate to the Republican Convention, and later

as Presidential Elector. There was even much talk of sending him to

Congress. Through the friendly offices of Mr. Howells, who was in

intimate personal relations with President Hayes, he was appointed

Minister to Spain. This honor was the more gratifying to him because

he had long been devoted to the Spanish literature and language, and

he could now read his beloved Calderon with new joys. In 1880 he was

promoted to the English mission, and during the next four years

represented his country at the Court of St. James in a manner that

raised him to the highest point of honor and esteem in both nations.

His career in England was an extraordinary, in most respects an

unparalleled success. He was our first official representative to win

completely the heart of the English people, and a great part of his

permanent achievement was to establish more cordial relations between

the two countries. His literary reputation had prepared the ground

for his personal popularity. He was greeted as "His Excellency the

Ambassador of American Literature to the Court of Shakespeare." His

fascinating personality won friends in every circle of society. Queen

Victoria declared that during her long reign no ambassador had created

so much interest or won so much regard. He had already been honored by

degrees from Oxford and Cambridge, and now many similar honors were

thrust upon him. He was acknowledged to be the best after-dinner

speaker in England, and no one was called upon so often for addresses

at dedications, the unveiling of tablets, and other civic occasions.

It is not strange that he became attached to England with an

increasing affection, but there was no diminution of his intense

Americanism. His celebrated Birmingham address on _Democracy_ is yet

our clearest and noblest exposition of American political principles

and ideals.

 

With the inauguration of Cleveland in 1885 Lowell's official residence

in England came to an end. He returned to America and for a time lived

with his daughter at Deerfoot Farm. Mrs. Lowell had died in England,

and he could not carry his sorrow back to Elmwood alone. He now

leisurely occupied himself with literary work, making an occasional

address upon literature or politics, which was always distinguished by

grace and dignity of style and richness of thought.

 

In November, 1886, he delivered the oration at the 250th anniversary

of the founding of Harvard University, and, rising to the requirements

of this notable occasion, he captivated his hearers, among whom were

many distinguished delegates from the great universities of Europe as

well as of America, by the power of his thought and the felicity of

his expression.

 

During the period of his diplomatic service he added almost nothing to

his permanent literary product. In 1869 he had published _Under the

Willows_, a collection that contains some of his finest poems. In the

same year _The Cathedral_ was published, a stately poem in blank

verse, profound in thought, with many passages of great poetic beauty.

In 1888 a final collection of poems was published, entitled

_Heartsease and Rue_, which opened with the memorial poem, _Agassiz_,

an elegy that would not be too highly honored by being bound in a

golden volume with _Lycidas_, _Adonais_ and _Thyrsis_. Going back to

his earliest literary studies, he again (1887) lectured at the Lowell

Institute on the old dramatists, Occasionally he gave a poem to the

magazines and a collection of these _Last Poems_ was made in 1895 by

Professor Norton. During these years were written many of the charming

_Letters_ to personal friends, which rank with the finest literary

letters ever printed and must always be regarded as an important part

of his prose works.

 

It was a gracious boon of providence that Lowell was permitted to

spend his last years at Elmwood, with his daughter, Mrs. Burnett, and

his grandchildren. There again, as in the early days, he watched the

orioles building their nests and listened to the tricksy catbird's

call. To an English friend he writes: "I watch the moon rise behind

the same trees through which I first saw it seventy years ago and have

a strange feeling of permanence, as if I should watch it seventy years

longer." In the old library by the familiar fireplace he sat, when the

shadows were playing among his beloved books, communing with the

beautiful past. What unwritten poems of pathos and sweetness may have

ministered to his great soul we cannot know. In 1890 a fatal disease

came upon him, and after long and heroic endurance of pain he died,

August 12, 1891, and under the trees of Mt. Auburn he rests, as in

life still near his great neighbor Longfellow. In a memorial poem

Oliver Wendell Holmes spoke for the thousands who mourned:

 

"Peace to thy slumber in the forest shade,

Poet and patriot, every gift was thine;

Thy name shall live while summers bloom and fade

And grateful memory guard thy leafy shrine."

 

Lowell's rich and varied personality presents a type of cultured

manhood that is the finest product of American democracy. The

largeness of his interests and the versatility of his intellectual

powers give him a unique eminence among American authors. His genius

was undoubtedly embarrassed by the diffusive tendency of his

interests. He might have been a greater poet had he been less the

reformer and statesman, and his creative impulses were often absorbed

in the mere enjoyment of exercising his critical faculty. Although he

achieved only a qualified eminence as poet, or as prose writer, yet

because of the breadth and variety of his permanent achievement he

must be regarded as our greatest man of letters. His sympathetic

interest, always outflowing toward concrete humanity, was a quality--

 

"With such large range as from the ale-house bench

Can reach the stars and be with both at home."

 

With marvelous versatility and equal ease he could talk with the

down-east farmer and salty seamen and exchange elegant compliments

with old world royalty. In _The Cathedral_ he says significantly:

 

"I thank benignant nature most for this,--

A force of sympathy, or call it lack

Of character firm-planted, loosing me

From the pent chamber of habitual self

To dwell enlarged in alien modes of thought,

Haply distasteful, wholesomer for that,

And through imagination to possess,

As they were mine, the lives of other men."

 

In the delightful little poem, _The Nightingale in the Study_, we have

a fanciful expression of the conflict between Lowell's love of books

and love of nature. His friend the catbird calls him "out beneath the

unmastered sky," where the buttercups "brim with wine beyond all

Lesbian juice." But there are ampler skies, he answers, "in Fancy's

land," and the singers though dead so long--

 

"Give its best sweetness to all song.

To nature's self her better glory."

 

His love of reading is manifest in all his work, giving to his style a

bookishness that is sometimes excessive and often troublesome. His

expression, though generally direct and clear, and happily colored by

personal frankness, is often burdened with learning. To be able to

read his essays with full appreciation is in itself evidence of a

liberal education. His scholarship was broad and profound, but it was

not scholarship in the German sense, exhaustive and exhausting. He

studied for the joy of knowing, never for the purpose of being known,

and he cared more to know the spirit and meaning of things than to

know their causes and origins. A language he learned for the sake of

its literature rather than its philology. As Mr. Brownell observes, he

shows little interest in the large movements of the world's history.

He seemed to prefer history as sublimated in the poet's song. The

field of _belles-lettres_ was his native province; its atmosphere was

most congenial to his tastes. In book-land it was always June for

him--

 

"Springtime ne'er denied

Indoors by vernal Chaucer, whose fresh woods

Throb thick with merle and mavis all the year."

 

But books could never divert his soul from its early endearments with

out-of-door nature. "The older I grow," he says, "the more I am

convinced that there are no satisfactions so deep and so permanent as

our sympathies with outward nature." And in the preface to _My Study

Windows_ he speaks of himself as "one who has always found his most

fruitful study in the open air." The most charming element of his

poetry is the nature element that everywhere cheers and stimulates the

reader. It is full of sunshine and bird music. So genuine, spontaneous

and sympathetic are his descriptions that we feel the very heart

throbs of nature in his verse, and in the prose of such records of

intimacies with outdoor friends as the essay, _My Garden

Acquaintance_. "How I do love the earth," he exclaims. "I feel it

thrill under my feet. I feel somehow as if it were conscious of my

love, as if something passed into my dancing blood from it." It is

this sensitive nearness to nature that makes him a better interpreter

of her "visible forms" than Bryant even; moreover, unlike Bryant he

always catches the notes of joy in nature's voices and feels the

uplift of a happy inspiration.

 

In the presence of the immense popularity of Mark Twain, it may seem

paradoxical to call Lowell our greatest American humorist. Yet in the

refined and artistic qualities of humorous writing and in the

genuineness of the native flavor his work is certainly superior to any

other humorous writing that is likely to compete with it for permanent

interest. Indeed, Mr. Greenslet thinks that "it is as the author of

the _Biglow Papers_ that he is likely to be longest remembered." The

perpetual play of humor gave to his work, even to the last, the

freshness of youth. We love him for his boyish love of pure fun. The

two large volumes of his _Letters_ are delicious reading because he

put into them "good wholesome nonsense," as he says, "keeping my

seriousness to bore myself with."

 

But this sparkling and overflowing humor never obscures the deep

seriousness that is the undercurrent of all his writing. A high

idealism characterizes all his work. One of his greatest services to

his country was the effort to create a saner and sounder political

life. As he himself realized, he often moralized his work too much

with a purposeful idealism. In middle life he said, "I shall never be

a poet until I get out of the pulpit, and New England was all

meeting-house when I was growing up." In religion and philosophy he

was conservative, deprecating the radical and scientific tendencies of

the age, with its knife and glass--

 

"That make thought physical and thrust far off

The Heaven, so neighborly with man of old,"

 

The moral impulse and the poetic impulse were often in conflict, and

much of his early poetry for this reason was condemned by his later

judgment. His maturer poems are filled with deep-thoughted lines,

phrases of high aspiration and soul-stirring ecstasies. Though his

thought is spiritual and ideal, it is always firmly rooted in the

experience of common humanity. All can climb the heights with him and

catch inspiring glimpses at least of the ideal and the infinite.