utes to his fellow poets. In these and others of his occasional poems (the 'Voyage of the Good Ship Union 'is one of the class poems) he has expressed also the broader loyalty of patriotism, both local and national. And in his later class poems the charm of mellow, genial, and youthful old age has found unique expression. There is little further to be said of the external facts of Holmes's life, or of his work. This is not the place to speak of his Lovels and other prose work, or of how he gave to the Atlantic Monthly its name and its character. Lowell was willing to accept the editorship only on condition that Holmes should be a constant contributor, and later he said: You see the Doctor is like a bright mountain stream that has been dammed up among the hills, and is waiting for an outlet into the Atlantic.' His later volumes of verse were published, Songs in Many Keys in 1861, Humorous Poems in 1865, Songs of Many Seasons in 1874, Bunker Hill Battle, etc. in 1875, The Iron Gate, etc. in 1880, Before the Curfew in 1888. He died October 7, 1894, the oldest, and the last survivor,' of our elder poets. If Whittier is the poet of a single section, New England, Holmes is the poet of a single city, Boston. It is a pity that he, instead of Emerson, did not write the quatrain What care though rival cities soar Along the stormy coast, Penn's town, New York, and Baltimore, Holmes would have written it better, and with some peculiar quaint touch of his own humor. He makes one of his characters in the Autocrat say: 'Boston State House is the hub of the Solar System. You could n't pry that out of a Boston man if you had the tire of all creation straightened out for a crowbar.' He says it in satire, but he has a subtle feeling that it is true. On the whole his verse, however, is to a less degree merely local in flavor than his prose. Holmes seldom strikes the deeper notes or touches on the higher themes of poetry, except that of patriotism. He is one of the chief poets of friendship and loyalty, as we have seen, but he expresses friendship rather in its social aspect, and chooses only to suggest its deeper feelings. So always, it is his own choice to touch but lightly on the surface of things. But if he is not among the great poets, he is among the rare. It is even one of the rarest things to make real poetry out of mere wit and humor, as he has so often done. In his humorous narratives, from the One-Hoss Shay' to the 'Broomstick Train,' and perhaps most of all in 'How the Old Horse won the Bet,' his verse sparkles and crackles in every line. And he has written two lyrics that are sure to live, the one serious, and the other so interwoven of fun and pathos that we shall never know whether it be serious or not: the Chambered Nautilus,' and the 'Last Leaf.' JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL was born February 22, 1819, in Cambridge, at Elmwood,' the house which he occupied during so large a part of his life. The Lowells were an old New England family, going back, in Massachusetts Colony, to 1639. The poet's father, grandfather, and great-grandfather were graduates of Harvard College. It was John Lowell, his grandfather, who as a member of the Constitutional Convention of Massachusetts in 1780 introduced into the Bill of Rights of the State a clause abolishing slavery'a good sort of grandfather for the author of the Biglow Papers,' as Dr. Edward Everett Hale The great-grandfather was a clergyman, the grandfather a lawyer, and the father again a clergyman, pastor of the First Church in Boston. The family had always been distinguished for ability and public spirit. An uncle of the poet, Francis Cabot Lowell, was one of the first successful manufacturers of New England, and for him the city of Lowell was named. Another uncle, John Lowell, Jr., founded the Lowell Institute in Boston. says. Lowell's mother was of Orkney descent. Both her father, Keith Spence, and her mother's father, Robert Traill, were New England merchants who had come from the Orkney Islands. Her mother's mother, Mary Whipple, was, however, of New England ancestry. Mary Whipple's father, William Whipple, was one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence, and her mother belonged to another old New England family, the Cutts, going back to the first half of the seventeenth century in New Eng land. James Russell Lowell was the youngest of six brothers and sisters. His home training, as in the case of Holmes, was that of a scholarly minister's family, illuminated in his case by his mother's strong imaginative temperament and skill in music. As a child, he was read to sleep from Spenser's Faerie Queene. He was surrounded by books and by nature (Elmwood being then at a considerable distance from other houses, among the woods and meadows), and from the first he showed an almost passionate love of both. After fitting for college in a Cambridge school, he entered Harvard in 1834, and had among his teachers there C. C. Felton, professor of Greek and later president of the college (celebrated by Longfellow in 'Three Friends of Mine'), Benjamin Peirce, the mathematician of Holmes's famous Class of '29,' George Ticknor, Longfellow's predecessor in the Smith professorship of Belles Lettres, and, in the last half of his course, Longfellow himself. Lowell read in college, he tells us, almost everything except the text-books prescribed by the faculty.' He had already devoured Scott's novels before entering college. Now he read Dante, Tasso, Montaigne, the old English dramatists, Butler, Cowper, Burns, Landor, Byron, Coleridge, Keats, Carlyle, and Milton, and, under the impulse of his study of Milton, something of the classics. As Dr. Hale tells us in his reminiscences, the college boys of those days were passionately devoted to literature, and Lowell's knowledge and ability made him a leader among them. He was an editor of Harvardiana, and was elected class poet. During his senior year he became so much more devoted to reading than to studying, and so regardless of prescribed exercises, including chapel, that he was suspended on account of continued neglect of his college duties, as it was expressed in the vote of the faculty; and was rusticated at Concord, where he lived and studied in the household of the Rev. Barzillai Frost. During this rustication he perhaps found models both for the Rev. Homer Wilbur and for Hosea Biglow. In any case, he met Emerson, and walked and talked with him, but at first was influenced more toward opposition than toward discipleship. In his class poem, which he was not allowed to deliver, but which he printed for distribution among his classmates, he ridiculed the transcendentalists and the abolitionists, and, in a mild way, Emerson himself. He loyally sent a copy of the poem to Emerson, with a note excusing himself for these liberties, but stoutly maintaining his own opinions. Emerson's influence gradually struck in,' however, and Lowell became, though not a disciple, an ardent admirer. Late in life he signed himself Emerson's liegeman,' and said that he for one must' Obey the voice at eve obeyed at prime.' We also find the anti-slavery feeling growing in him during this same year, and beginning to dominate his thought at least a year before he first met Miss Maria White, to whose influence it has usually been attributed. The abolitionists,' he wrote in November, 1838, are the only ones with whom I sympathize of the present extant parties.' He had been allowed to return to Cambridge just in time to graduate with his class in 1838. Not knowing what else to do, he, like Holmes, began the study of the law, and graduated from the Law School in 1840. During these two years he continued his eager reading, and now paid much more attention to the classics than he had done in college when they were prescribed subjects. Ovid, Theocritus, and the Greek dramatists seem to have been his favorites. In August, 1840, he graduated from the Law School, and became engaged to Miss Maria White, whom he had met late in the previous year. He entered a law office in Boston, but spent most of his time in reading and in writing verse, and seems never to have had, on his own account, that First Client' whose imaginary existence offered the material of his later humorous sketch. Late in this year (1840) he published his first book of verse, A Year's Life, dated 1841; and in 1841-1842 he published many poems and essays in the magazines of the time. Among his poems of this period are the beautiful lyrics, 'My Love,' Irene,' and the song 'O Moonlight deep and tender;' and in many of the sonnets there is a personal sincerity and a fineness of poetic quality to be found in few other American sonnets. These poems express his feeling for Miss White, whose influence upon him was strong and always ideal. It was partly through her influence, and partly through his own natural development, that Lowell had now openly joined forces with the extreme abolitionists, at a time when abolition seemed mere quixotism, was despised by almost all conservative people, even in New England, and shut out its devotees from the social circles to which Lowell was born, and from many of the most important literary magazines and publishing houses. At the end of 1842 Lowell entirely gave up the law, and with Robert Carter attempted to start a new magazine, The Pioneer. This was not a success financially, and left Lowell considerably in debt by its failure after the third number had been published. The list of contributors to the three numbers which did appear included most of the chief contemporary writers, - Hawthorne, Whittier, Poe, W. W. Story, Thomas William Parsons, and Lowell. Lowell was in New York during the winter of 1842-43, and made many acquaintances and friends among the men of letters there. He published a new volume of Poems in December, 1843 (dated 1844), which contained Rhocus,' 'An Incident in a Railroad Car,' The Shepherd of King Admetus,' the 'Stanzas on Freedom,' etc. A year later, in December, 1844, he published Conversations on Some of the Old Poets. Both these volumes were republished in London, and they brought Lowell considerable reputation in England and in America. Lowell was married to Miss White in December, 1844, and for some months after his marriage lived in Philadelphia, where he was employed as editorial writer on the Pennsylvania Freeman at the munificent salary of ten dollars a month. In May, 1845, he returned to Elmwood, where he lived until his first trip to Europe, in 1851. These were the busiest and poetically the most productive years of his life, and they were years full of both joy and sorrow in his home life, and of growing friendships with his chief contemporaries, most of them, like Holmes and Longfellow, his elders by ten years or more. His first child, Blanche, was born December 31, 1845, and died March 19, 1847. The second daughter, Mabel, was born September 9, 1847. Lowell is not so popular a poet of the home as Longfellow, but in 'The First Snowfall,' The Changeling,' She Came and Went,' I thought our love at full, but I did err,' and later, in After the Burial,' 'The Dead House,' The Wind-Harp,' and' Auf Wiedersehen,' he has written poems of home joys and sorrows that have a deeper and more intimate appeal. 6 The year 1848 has been called by Lowell's latest biographer his annus mirabilis.' Just at the end of 1847 appeared his Poems, Second Series (dated 1848), containing the noble poem 'Columbus;' the characteristic Indian Summer Reverie;' The Present Crisis, as strong and as universal in its truth as the very best of Whittier's work; To the Dandelion; and other important short poems. In 1848 were published the Biglow Papers, First Series, the Fable for Critics, and the Vision of Sir Launfal, besides some forty articles and poems in various periodicals. From 1846 to 1850 Lowell was a regular contributor to the National Anti-Slavery Standard. In July, 1851, he sailed for Europe, spent nearly a year in Italy, and returned home through Switzerland, Germany, France, and England, having for companions on the return voyage Thackeray and Clough. The journey had been undertaken partly on account of Mrs. Lowell's health, but she continued to fail, and died October 21, 1853. Holmes had given his lectures on the English Poets of the Nineteenth Century at the Lowell Institute in 1853. In the winter of 1854-55 Lowell gave there a general course on poetry, which marked the beginning of his mature criticism, and which seems to have impressed its hearers as the best lecture-course ever given at this famous Institute. Three weeks after the beginning of the course he was appointed to the Smith Professorship at Harvard (which Longfellow had just resigned), with a year's leave of absence for study and travel abroad. He held this professorship, except for an interval of two years, until his appointment as Minister to Spain in 1877. Since Lowell's resignation of it no appointment has been made, and it remains distinguished by the names of its three holders, Ticknor, Longfellow, Lowell. During his year of preparation Lowell went to Paris (and to Chartres, where he received the impressions out of which grew his poem The Cathedral'); then to London, where he visited Thackeray and Leigh Hunt; then to Dresden for the winter, where he attended lectures at the University. There is something pathetic-or even tragicin the idea of putting the poet to school again after he has reached middle age, to make of him a professor ! - even so distinguished a professor as Lowell was. In the spring he escaped for another visit to Italy, and returned to America in August. He taught regularly from 1856 to 1872, giving courses on Dante, German Literature, Spanish Literature (especially Don Quixote), and later on old French; and public lectures on English Poetry and Belles Lettres. He was not so faithful a routine teacher as Longfellow, but many students have borne witness to the inspiration received from him. He was not of course a scholar in the narrow modern sense of the word, except to a certain extent in old French; but he was an omnivorous reader, and his general knowledge of literature was probably not surpassed in breadth or intimacy by that of any teacher in his time. Lowell was the first editor-in-chief of the Atlantic Monthly from its foundation in 1857 until 1861. From 1864 to 1872 he was editor, with his close friend, Mr. Charles Eliot Norton, of the North American Review. Leaving out of account the second series of the Biglow Papers, all of which appeared in the Atlantic Monthly from 1862 to 1866, his contributions to both of these reviews were much more important in prose than in verse. During the first part of the period, his articles dealt particularly with public affairs, and were notable for his strong support of Lincoln. (See note on page 490.) In the later part of the period appeared some of Lowell's best literary essays, which were collected in Among My Books (1870), My Study Windows (1871), and Among My Books, Second Series (1876). In 1869 was published Under the Willows and Other Poems, and in 1870 The Cathedral. In 1872, Lowell asked the Harvard authorities for leave of absence with half pay, which is now granted to most college professors every seventh year. After his sixteen years of continuous teaching, however, this was refused him, and he resigned his position. The years 1872-74 he spent in Europe, mostly at Paris, Rome, and Florence. While in England he received the degrees of D. C. L. from Oxford and LL. D. from Cambridge. On his return in 1874 he again took up his professorship. Lowell's poems of the war period, even if we were to leave out of account the second series of the Biglow Papers, which stand by themselves and are incomparable, must still be considered more important than those of any other poet except Whitman. They include The Washers of the Shroud' (1861), the memorial poem to Robert Gould Shaw (1864), 'On Board the '76' (1865), and culminate in the Commemoration Ode,' which seems by almost universal consent to be ranked as the greatest single poem yet written in America. Lowell had the right to speak as he did in these poems and in the Biglow Papers. He had not, like Longfellow and Holmes, any son of his own to send to the war (though it is certain that if there had been a son in Lowell's family, he would have gone), but his nephews, 'the hope of our race,' as he calls them, whom he loved almost as if they were his own sons, three as noble young men as fought on either side, —all won their death-wounds in battle. Lowell's Commemoration Öde,' the Biglow Papers, and the Three Memorial Poems, make him unquestionably our greatest poet of patriotism. Yet, when he was aroused to bitter denunciation of the corruption in public life revealed under Grant's administration, and in his 'Agassiz' wrote a few stinging lines about the spectacle which The land of honest Abraham' (or, as he first wrote it, the land of broken promise') was then offering to the world, he naturally received a storm of abuse from the party press of the time. His sufficient answer was the three memorial poems of 1875 and 1876. In his Epistle to George William Curtis, written in 1874, but not published till 1888, he answered for himself more directly: Was I too bitter? Who his phrase can choose Lowell was delegate to the Republican Convention, and presidential elector, in 1876. In 1877 he was appointed Minister to Spain, where he at once won the sympathies of the Spanish people. His coming was looked on as a revival of the days when Irving was minister. Among other honors, he received that of an election to the Spanish Academy. In January, 1880, he was transferred to London, the most important post in the American diplomatic service. Here he was equally successful in his larger field. He did more than any other minister has done to interpret to England the character and the strength of America, and to lay the foundations of that friendship, based on mutual respect, which has since been built up between the two chief branches of the English-speaking race. It has been said that he was the most popular man in England. Certainly no one was more in demand on every public occasion, especially where speech-making was in order. Lowell's speeches were clever, witty, always fitted to the occasion, and, wherever this was appropriate, were weighty and important; and they were almost as numerous as the days of the year. In these speeches he was always, on occasion, strongly American and strongly democratic. There is no better exposition of the American idea than his address on 'Democracy' at Manchester. And he conducted public affairs with absolute firmness, never yielding anything so far as America was in the right. With all his grace,' it has been well said, there was a plainness of purpose that could not be mistaken.' Yet during his mission, and after his return to America, he was again bitterly assailed by the partisan press, who blamed him for his very success and for the respect which he had won. Because he was a gentleman and a man of the world, and had conducted affairs with courtesy as well as firmness, he was accused of being un-American, and of toadying to the British nobility. Nothing could be more unjust or farther from the truth. It was precisely because he was always and strongly American that he won the respect of the English. In many other Americans of culture, as for instance Washington Irving and Mr. Charles Eliot Norton, they had thought they found simply Englishmen transferred to an unfortunate environment and making the best of it. Lowell compelled them to feel that he was always, as one of them has expressed it, 'a scrappy Yankee,' and a typical Yankee. It was Lowell's great service to prove that a thoroughly typical American could be also a thorough gentleman, a man of broad culture, and, in every best sense, a man of the world. He returned to America in 1885. Shortly before his return the second Mrs. Lowell died. He had married, in September, 1857, the sister of a close friend of his first wife, who had been chosen by her to care for her only daughter. He came back to find many of his best friends gone, among them Longfellow and Emerson, but younger friends still remained to him, like George William Curtis, Mr. Norton, and Mr. Howells. He wrote in the Postscript' (1887) of his Epistle to George William Curtis: ' Home am I come: not, as I hoped might be, To the old haunts, too full of ghosts for me, And the loved books that younger grow with years; To country rambles, timing with my tread Once so inspiring, Emerson not there! But life is sweet, though all that makes it sweet |