Wit 
 
THE BEACON BIOGRAPHIES 
 
 EDITED BY 
 
 M. A. DEWOLFE HOWE 
 
 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL 
 
 BY 
 
 EDWARD EVERETT HALE, JR. 
 
tstf/ntttt/- $&0*9i/U9*9y 
 
.Ar^^^J^To^- "Dv9^ 
 
JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL 
 
 BY 
 
 EDWARD EVERETT HALE, JR. 
 
 S*T\ B R A 
 
 ~ OF THE 
 
 UNIVERSITY 
 
 
 BOSTON 
 
 SMALL, MAYNARD & COMPANY 
 MDCCCXCIX 
 
Copyright, 1899 
 By Small, Maynard ff Company 
 
 Entered at Stationers Hall 
 
 Press of 
 George H. Ellis, Boston 
 
The photogravure used as a frontispiece 
 to this volume is from a photograph taken 
 during the summer of 1891 by Pach 
 Brothers, Cambridge. The present engrav 
 ing is by John Andrew & Son, Boston. 
 
 1 J A Q O 
 
 )O / 
 
PEEFACE. 
 
 There are already several excellent books 
 on Lowell, and there will be many more. 
 A real life of him by a contemporary we 
 should like, but now shall probably never 
 have. Professor Norton and my father 
 have in different ways done much to fill the 
 lack, so that we may get some idea of how 
 Lowell appeared to those of his own time, 
 those who began when he began and lived 
 through what he lived through. What is 
 next wanted (and every year makes the 
 chance of it rarer) is a life by some one 
 of those younger men of letters, Mr. How- 
 ells, for instance, or Mr. Stedman, men 
 of the literary generation just following 
 Loivell, who began their work in friendship 
 with him avid in the encouragement of his 
 interest, and whose warm personal opinion, 
 ripened now, and with the perspective of a 
 dozen years, would give as nearly a true 
 idea of Lowell as one would want. It need 
 not be said that the following essay makes 
 no attempt to realize either of these possi- 
 
viii PEEFACE 
 
 Ulities. This is but one of the lives of 
 Lowell written by posterity. 
 
 I have written, then, from a position 
 which has disadvantages as well as advan 
 tages. It is true that I cannot for an 
 instant think or write of Lowell as Pro 
 fessor Norton or Mr. Howells can, and 
 could not, had I their knoivledge and appre 
 ciation. But, then, it is also true that they 
 cannot think of Lowell or write of him as I 
 can. By the time I began to be interested 
 in literature Lowell was already a classic ; 
 and I regarded him practically as such, 
 which means a great deal. Such a way of 
 regarding him is not necessarily better than 
 the way in which his friends thought of him. 
 Certainly not that; but it is different, and 
 witli a very natural and rational difference. 
 It is, moreover, the way Lowell must more 
 and more come to be regarded as time goes 
 on. Lowell can no longer be one of the 
 living forces of our own generation. He 
 can no longer be even a present inspiration. 
 He is already and must remain a classic, 
 
PEEFACE ix 
 
 with all the advantages and drawbacks at- 
 tendant. 
 
 A keen observer has said, in speaking of 
 Lowell as a man, that you had to surrender 
 yourself to his influence before he approved 
 of you and allowed you to get his best. 
 After that he teas very glad to reveal him 
 self. I am not quite sure that I have sub 
 mitted to his influence. I rather hope not. 
 But I also hope, all the same, that, in a 
 way, I have got the best of him that is now 
 possible. That is what I want, all, I 
 think, that any one should now ask. In 
 this essay much has of necessity been left 
 out ; but it has been my aim to seize those 
 characteristics and qualities which must en 
 dure, and which will make him a necessity 
 to those who live after him. 
 
 EDWARD E. HALE, JR. 
 UNION COLLEGE, March 8, 1899. 
 
CHRONOLOGY. 
 
 1819 
 February 22. James Russell Lowell was 
 
 born. 
 
 1828 
 
 Entered Mr. Wells s school. 
 
 1834 
 Admitted to Harvard College. 
 
 1838 
 
 June. Rusticated, and sent to Concord. 
 August. Class poem. 
 
 1838-40 
 Attended the Harvard Law School. 
 
 1841 
 
 January. Published A Year s Life, and 
 Oilier Poems. 
 
 November. Began contributing " The Old 
 Dramatists" and other articles to the 
 
 Boston Miscellany. 
 
 1842 
 
 January. Began editing the Pioneer. 
 March. Left the Pioneer. 
 October. Severed his connection with the 
 Boston Miscellany. 
 
xii CHEOKOLOGY 
 
 1843 
 December. Published " Poems. 7 
 
 1844 
 
 December 26. Marriage to Miss Maria 
 White, of Watertown. 
 
 1845 
 
 January. Published the Conversations on 
 Some of the Old Poets. 
 
 1845-46 
 
 Lived in Philadelphia during the winter 
 and began to write for the Pennsylvania 
 Freeman. 
 
 1846 
 
 June. Published the first of "The Big- 
 low Papers " in the Boston Courier, and 
 began to write for the Anti-slavery Stand 
 ard. 
 
 1847 
 November. Began A Fable for Critics. 
 
 1848 
 
 November. Published A Fable for Critics 
 and The Biglow Papers. 
 December. Published The Legend of Sir 
 Launfal and Poems in two volumes. 
 
CHRONOLOGY xiii 
 
 1851 
 July. Went to Europe. 
 
 1852 
 
 October. Returned to his home at Elm- 
 wood. 
 
 1853 
 
 October. Mrs. Lowell died. 
 
 November. Published "A Moosehead 
 
 Journal " in Putnam s Magazine. 
 
 1854 
 
 January. Began the Lowell Lectures in 
 Boston. His appointment to chair of 
 belles-lettres at Harvard determined on. 
 April. Published " Cambridge Thirty 
 Years Ago" in Putnam s Magazine. 
 
 1855 
 
 March. Published "Leaves from my 
 Journal" in Graham s Magazine. 
 July. Went to Europe for the second 
 time. 
 
 1855-56 
 
 Spent the winter in Dresden, and went 
 to Italy in the spring. 
 
xiv CHRONOLOGY 
 
 1856 
 August. Returned to Cambridge. 
 
 1857 
 
 Married Miss Frances Dunlap, of Port 
 land. 
 
 November. As editor, published the first 
 number of the Atlantic Monthly. 
 
 1858 
 August. Published The Pocket Celebration 
 
 of the Fourth. 
 
 1860 
 
 October. Published The Election in No 
 vember. 
 
 1861 
 
 June. Edited the Atlantic Monthly for the 
 last time. 
 
 Published the first Biglow Papers of the 
 second series. 
 
 1864 
 
 Undertook with Charles Eliot Norton, 
 the editorship of the North American Ee~ 
 view. 
 Published the Fireside Travels. 
 
CHEONOLOGY xv 
 
 1865 
 
 July. Wrote and delivered the Commem 
 oration Ode. 
 
 1867 
 Published The Biglow Papers, second 
 
 series. 
 
 1868 
 Published Under the Willows. 
 
 1870 
 
 Published The Cathedral and Among My 
 Books. 
 
 1871 
 
 Published My Study Windows. 
 
 1872 
 
 April. Eesigned the editorship of the 
 North American Review. 
 July. Went to Europe, and spent the 
 following winter in Paris. 
 
 1873 
 
 June. Eeceived the degree of D.C.L. 
 from Oxford. 
 
 1874 
 
 June. Eeceived the degree of LL.D. 
 from Cambridge. 
 
xvi CHBONOLOGY 
 
 1874 (continued) 
 July 4. Eeturned home to Elmwood. 
 
 1875 
 
 April 17. Delivered the Centennial Ode at 
 Lexington. 
 
 July 3. Delivered Under the Old Elm. 
 Published Among My Books, second se 
 ries. 
 
 1876 
 
 June. Went as a delegate to the National 
 Eepublican Convention. 
 July 4. Delivered the Ode for the Fourth 
 of July. 
 
 1877 
 
 February. Delivered lectures at Johns 
 Hopkins University. 
 July. Left for Spain as United States 
 minister. 
 
 1878 
 
 April-July. Travelled in Southern Eu 
 rope, reaching Constantinople and Ath 
 ens. 
 
 1880 
 January. Named minister to England. 
 
CHRONOLOGY xvii 
 
 1881 
 
 October-December. Made a vacation tour 
 through Germany and Italy. 
 
 1884 
 
 April. Eeceived the degree of LL.D. 
 from Edinburgh. 
 
 June. Eeceived the degree of LL.D. 
 from Harvard. 
 
 1885 
 
 February. Mrs. Lowell died. 
 May. Eeturned to America, to Deerfoot 
 Farm, Southboro, Mass. 
 
 1886 
 
 November 8. Spoke at the two hundred 
 and fiftieth anniversary of the founding 
 of Harvard College. 
 
 1887 
 
 Published Heartsease and Eue and De 
 mocracy and Other Addresses. 
 
 1888-89 
 
 Passed the winter quietly at his books in 
 Boston. 
 
xviii CHEONOLOGY 
 
 1889 
 
 June. Made his last visit to England. - 
 November. Eeturned home to Elmwood. 
 
 1890 
 
 April-May. Edited the Riverside Edition 
 of his Works. 
 
 1891 
 
 Published Literary and Political Addresses. 
 August 12. James Eussell Lowell died at 
 Elmwood. 
 
JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL 
 

 OF 
 
 FO 
 
 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 
 
 I. 
 
 A CERTAIN lady, who was going to 
 write the life of a friend who had been 
 a famous mathematician, told Ibsen of 
 her plan. The imaginative dramatist 
 exclaimed, 
 
 "Is it her biography, in the ordinary 
 sense of the word, which you intend to 
 write, or is it not rather a poem about 
 her?" 
 
 A poem instead of an ordinary biogra 
 phy, that, surely, would be the happy 
 privilege of a poet. Lowell himself, 
 when he desired to commemorate the 
 life of Agassiz, wrote a poem about him ; 
 and who will say that as much truth is 
 not in these verses of his as may be 
 found in any excellent article on the 
 same subject in some encyclopaedia f 
 But to write a poem about a man or on 
 any other subject is not allowed to all, 
 even with the greatest freedom of 
 
2 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL 
 speech : it is a very restricted privilege, j 
 the privilege of such as are able to 
 do so. 
 
 Ordinary people, however, may fort- j 
 unately turn the matter inside out, as 
 it were, and still keep the spirit of the i 
 thing. We have as good authority as 
 Ibsen even. A good while ago now, 
 John Milton (looking forward to living 
 his own life rather than writing about 
 the life of somebody else) thought 
 "that he who would not be frustrate 
 of his hope to write well hereafter in 
 laudable things ought himself to be a 
 true poem; that is, a composition and 
 pattern of the best and honorablest 
 things, not presuming to sing high 
 praises of heroic men or famous cities, 
 unless he have in himself the experi 
 ence and practice of all that which is 
 praiseworthy. " So as to James Kussell 
 Lowell it is hardly necessary to write 
 a "poem about him, ?? for to a very 
 great degree his life was what the 
 
or 
 IFO 
 JAMES EUSSELL LTAVELL 3 
 
 older poet calls a poem. Certainly in 
 our recollection of him there is nothing 
 to jar the harmonies of noble ideal and 
 noble living that his life presents. He 
 was a man of letters and a student, 
 deep in the languages and literatures 
 of the Old World ; and he was also a 
 very American citizen, zealous and vig 
 orous in his youth and full of wisdom 
 in his later years. He was a critic who 
 pronounced judgment and a satirist who 
 made acceptance of his judgment by 
 laughter ; but he was also a poet not 
 only in rhythms, but in his way of 
 thinking. He was a public man, a man 
 whose daily work might affect thousands 
 whom he never saw, and of whom he 
 never heard, but he was also one of the 
 best and warmest friends in private life 
 that his friends ever knew. The recol 
 lection of such a life must needs be 
 very like a poem in the minds of the 
 people that remember him. We may 
 call it a poem, though not set to verse ; 
 
4 JAMES EUSSELL LOWELL 
 for it was the product of a noble nat 
 ure, and because the appreciation of it 
 ennobles us. Sidney said that he never 
 heard the old ballad of " Chevy Chase " 
 but that his heart moved more than 
 at the sound of a trumpet ; and it is cer 
 tainly the virtue of the greatest poetry 
 to arouse and vivify the human spirit. 
 But even the truest poems of LowelFs 
 never did as much for his countrymen 
 as did his life, so far as it could well 
 be known. 
 
 Ibsen, going on to speak of the life 
 of the mathematician, said, "You must 
 treat the subject romantically." This 
 is a dark saying. The man who is real 
 istic in fiction advises a romantic treat 
 ment, when it comes to facts. How 
 should we treat the life of Lowell roman 
 tically 1 Well, if it comes to that, how 
 shall we treat it in any other way, 
 except with most laborious toiling in 
 authorities and assumption of the Dry 
 asdust attitude, which would serve no 
 
JAMES BUSSELL LOWELL 5 
 real advantage with our present pur 
 poses f 
 
 He was born in Cambridge, it is 
 true, not so very long ago, in a 
 house which you can go in a trolley 
 car and see ; and yet, so far as concerns 
 your familiarity with circumstances and 
 conditions, he might almost as well have 
 been born in any country of romance 
 that you might choose. The Cambridge 
 of those days is not the Cambridge we 
 may see to-day. That little town and 
 its inhabitants are "as thoroughly 
 preterite as Romulus or Numa," "as 
 shadowy as one of your Etruscan Lu- 
 cumos or Roman consuls," and were 
 so half a century ago, when Lowell de 
 scribed them. It was a country village, 
 with dignified old colonial houses, with 
 horse-chestnuts and lindens which had 
 had to stay behind when the Tories went ; 
 quiet, unspeculative, without enterprise, 
 sufficing to itself; with a character of 
 its own, and characters, too, and with 
 
6 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL 
 
 its native festivals, muster, Cornwallis, 
 and August Commencement, as being 
 the seat of the oldest college in the 
 country. So Lowell describes the Cam 
 bridge of his youth, evidently not the 
 Cambridge that we think of now, as the 
 Boston of that time was not the Boston 
 of to-day, and, we might add, as the 
 United States of 1820 was not our 
 country as we think of her to-day. 
 
 Cambridge in the year 1819 when 
 Lowell was born, on the 22d of Feb 
 ruary was a town of about four thou 
 sand inhabitants. Boston, in which town 
 his father was pastor of the West Church, 
 had about fifteen times as many. Har 
 vard College, when Lowell entered it, 
 had, perhaps, one-eighth as many stu 
 dents as it has now 5 and the whole 
 country had a population not much 
 greater in proportion. But it is not 
 only the change which comes first to 
 our mind that we must remember. We 
 must remember other immense differ- 
 
JAMES BUSSELL LOWELL 7 
 
 ences in the time. It was in 1820 that 
 the Missouri Compromise was passed, 
 and the fact that most of us have to 
 look into a book to see just what the 
 Missouri Compromise was shows a 
 change more important than in pop 
 ulation. And, immediately more im 
 portant than that, it was in the same 
 year that Irving s Sketch Book was 
 published, a book significant in the 
 history of American literature. Liter 
 ature and public life, Lowell s energies 
 were to express themselves chiefly in 
 these two directions, or, rather, with 
 him the two directions were to become 
 almost parallel. So it will be a good 
 thing for us to get an idea, or to revive 
 our recollection, of the difference between 
 public life then and now and literature 
 I then and now. 
 
 For a good many years before Sep 
 tember 22, 1862, no public man could 
 avoid taking a definite position on the 
 subject of slavery. He might not take 
 
8 JAMES EUSSELL LOWELL 
 a reasonable position, but some position 
 he had to take. As we look back to 
 the years of LowelPs boyhood, it seems 
 as though there could have been but a 
 single course obvious and even obliga 
 tory. In 1820 was the Missouri Com 
 promise, in 1830 Webster s Eeply to 
 Hayne, in 1831 the Liberator was estab 
 lished, in 1832 was passed the South 
 Carolina Nullification Ordinance, in 1837 
 Lovejoy was murdered, and Austin said 
 that he had died like a fool. Things 
 like these forced a man to feel that 
 there was something to do in public 
 life. Now, things are different to-day. 
 It is not that the call to public life 
 comes to a high-hearted young man 
 with less authority than it did, but 
 certainly it comes with less immediate 
 appeal to the conscience. The poet of 
 to-day rarely feels his heart stirred on 
 the question of the Tariff, Civil Service 
 Eeform, or even of Municipal Govern 
 ment. Not that there is nothing in 
 
JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL 9 
 our current political life which ought to 
 arouse the sympathy : there is, and not 
 the less that its call is less readily heard 
 among so many jarring interests. But 
 there is nothing that stirs the heart as 
 did slavery. 
 
 Still, it cannot be affirmed that in the 
 two decades of LowelPs youth the pub 
 lic sentiment of Massachusetts pushed 
 everybody in the right direction in this 
 matter. Lowell himself did not see the 
 real possibilities of public affairs in his 
 youthful days. He was neutral, prob 
 ably, in his mind, as were, doubtless, 
 very many more of his time, neutral, 
 partly because they thought other mat 
 ters of greater importance, and partly 
 because they felt that the whole matter 
 was better hushed up and kept out of 
 public attention, like a cholera scare 
 that may be bad for business. 
 
 With literature the case was different. 
 It is not remarkable that, to the young 
 American of Lowell s youth, letters pre- 
 
10 JAMES BUSSELL LOWELL 
 sented an immense attraction. Lowell 
 was in college not so very long after 
 Keats, Coleridge, and Wordsworth, had 
 become famous, and only a few years 
 after the first volume of Tennyson. 
 " Great voices were sounding in those 
 days/ says Matthew Arnold, thinking 
 of his own days at Oxford. With Lowell 
 we should rather say beautiful echoes, 
 perhaps, or, indeed, not so much echoes 
 as the calls of those who had gone on 
 before. Especially was America alert to 
 listen. The years of Lowell 7 s youth were 
 inspiring years for a young man who felt 
 the sap of poetry within him. His ear 
 lier years saw these publications, The 
 Sketch Book, The Spy, The Ages, Nature, 
 Tamerlane and Other Poems, Twice Told 
 Tales, Voices of the Night, in other 
 words, the first works of Bryant, Emer 
 son, Poe, Hawthorne, and Longfellow, 
 and, with some exceptions, the first sig 
 nificant work of Irving and Cooper. 
 Think, then, of the stimulus of those 
 
JAMES ETJSSELL LOWELL 11 
 years to a young man who loved letters 
 and thought by letters to make himself 
 a name. Nowadays everybody writes, 
 but with no especial idea of accom 
 plishing great things : in Lowell s youth 
 there was the definite opportunity to 
 have a hand in creating a literature for 
 one s country. 
 
 So Lowell, born in Cambridge in the 
 first quarter of the century, was born into 
 a very different world from that which 
 we see to-day, and one which was far more 
 likely to give free play to the generous 
 activities of his nature. Commercialism 
 and Science and " Society were all in 
 their infancy, and Letters and Public 
 Life called not unpersuasively to the 
 young men of that day who had great 
 possessions. 
 
 James Eussell Lowell was certainly one 
 of those who find themselves in an oppor 
 tunity. He came of one of the honored 
 families of New England, his father being 
 of the profession which had for two hun- 
 
12 JAMES BUSSELL LOWELL 
 dred years held in New England a place 
 of peculiar honor. He received the best 
 education of his time, at school and at 
 Harvard College at a time when the stu 
 dent at Harvard could not easily miss the 
 especial benefits that the college had for 
 him. He had received such training as 
 the best society of a cultivated town could 
 give, and had also had the opportunity 
 to know Nature intimately and to love 
 her. 
 
 On the day of his graduation from Har 
 vard College, when he was nineteen years 
 old, the observer sees that it will be im 
 possible for him to avoid his destiny save 
 by direct effort ; for he has sanctified 
 himself according to the common custom 
 of the poets by setting at naught the pre 
 scriptions of college authority, so that 
 his Class Poem has to be printed while 
 he is absent in rustication. Shelley and 
 Landor, in like manner, could not bear 
 the rule of their professors ; and, if Byron 
 and Wordsworth did take their degrees 
 
JAMES BUSSELL LOWELL 13 
 at Cambridge, they did not come out 
 wranglers. 
 
 On graduating from college, Lowell pro 
 ceeded to study law. He received Ms de 
 gree from the Harvard Law School in 1840, 
 and was called to the bar. But he was 
 about as much of a lawyer as Walter Scott 
 in his earlier days, or as Macaulay, to 
 mention one or two who had preceded him. 
 He did his reading honestly and well, de 
 spite certain waverings of intention ; and 
 he got creditably to the end of his legal 
 studies, and he really opened an office 
 for the practice of law. But there the 
 matter ended except for its after influence. 
 He was of course devoted to letters. He 
 knew this, had always known it, and 
 never in the bottom of his heart had he 
 had the intention of being anything but a 
 poet. It does not appear that he wrote 
 poems at a very early age, as some people 
 do ; but as soon as he got to Harvard Col 
 lege his passion had a chance. ( Let it be 
 remembered, " says another student of the 
 
14 JAMES EUSSELL LOWELL 
 same time, "that the whole drift of fash 
 ion, occupation, and habit among the 
 undergraduates ran in lines suggested by 
 literature. ? ? In all these directions, then, 
 in which literature led the college student, 
 Lowell directed his energy. He wrote the 
 rhymed minutes of the Hasty Pudding. 
 He was one of the founders of Alpha 
 Delta Phi, then at Harvard a pre-emi 
 nently literary society. He was one of the 
 editors of Harvardiana, one of the pio 
 neers of college journalism. He was the 
 recognized poet of the class of 1838, and 
 wrote the Class Poem. When he gradu 
 ated, then, he had already made a begin 
 ning, as so many other poets had before his 
 time, and as so many other generous- 
 hearted boys have since, elsewhere as in 
 the dear, if narrow, confines of the Yard. 
 And this beginning he continued, so 
 that in the next few years he had already 
 done his first work as poet, critic, and 
 editor. In 1841 was published A Year s 
 Life, his first volume of verse ; in the next 
 
JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL 15 
 year lie wrote for the Boston Miscellany his 
 articles on the Elizabethan Dramatists ; 
 and in 1843, with his friend Carter, he 
 projected and edited the Pioneer for the 
 three months of its noteworthy, if unpros- 
 perous career. The last two exercises 
 we may pass lightly, but of the poems a 
 word or two must be said. 
 
 Later in life Lowell looked back on 
 these poems with mixed feelings. In 
 making a final collection, he quoted the 
 remark that Landor puts into the mouth 
 of Petrarch, We neither of us are such 
 poets as we thought ourselves when we 
 were younger. " He would gladly have 
 suppressed many which are still reprint 
 ed. He even somewhere says of himself in 
 college days that he was "as great an ass 
 as ever brayed, and thought it singing. " 
 But all this must be taken for what it is 
 worth. Lowell himself, looking back, was 
 probably thinking that there was a lack 
 of serious aim. In middle life he said of 
 Dryden, "Perhaps there is no schooling 
 
16 JAMES BUSSELL LOWELL 
 so good for an author as his own youthful 
 indiscretions " ; and about the same time 
 in a letter he writes, "I should not be so 
 indiscreet now, I suppose ; and yet a living 
 verse can only be made of a living expe 
 rience, and that our own. Certainly, we 
 need not think these great poems. None 
 of them is so well known as to be remem 
 bered except because it is by him. But, 
 if they were a young man s poems, born 
 of visionary beauty and fancy, they had 
 in them the seed of something more. Co 
 lumbus listening as a boy 
 
 "to hear 
 
 The tall pine forests of the Apennines 
 Murmur their hoary legends of the sea," 
 
 and watching 
 
 "The while a pair of herons trailingly 
 Flapped inland," 
 
 never dreamed of what afterward came 
 true. Nor did Lowell among the more 
 homelike trees and birds of Elmwood 
 
JAMES EUSSELL LOWELL 17 
 clearly see what work was in store for 
 him, when his hand had later learned its 
 best cunning and his heart been stirred 
 to give forth its truest sympathy. 
 
II. 
 
 In the town in which I live there is a 
 wall on one side of the canal as it runs 
 through the town, considerably below 
 the level of the streets ; and in that wall 
 there is a door. That door is said to have 
 led to one of the stations of the Under 
 ground Eailway. I always look at it as 
 I would at a scene in a theatre, and have 
 never tried to imagine where it can lead 
 to. Now that I think of it, I suppose 
 that it goes into somebody s cellar. I 
 was saying how natural it was to write 
 of Lowell romantically. To us of the 
 present generation the anti-slavery move 
 ment is already becoming romance. The 
 Jubilee Singers were not so far wrong 
 when they sang, 
 
 "Oh, Uncle Tom s Cabin is a mighty fine 
 
 book, 
 
 And ? twas written by nobody human : 
 ? Twas written long ago, by Harriet 
 Beecher Stowe, 
 
JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL 19 
 
 And she lived upon the other side of 
 Jordan. " 
 
 Save to professed students of history, 
 the Abolitionist movement is by this time 
 as much a part of our heroic age as the 
 battle of Bunker Hill or the landing of 
 the Pilgrims. In this movement Lowell 
 had his part. 
 
 Originally, he had not meant to do any 
 thing of the sort. His literary work in 
 college, and his work after college for 
 the Boston Miscellany and the Pioneer, 
 had been of the kind that one would 
 have supposed. The Class Poem and the 
 work on the Elizabethan Dramatists were 
 in accordance with the proper develop 
 ment of a young man of letters. Lowell 
 had at this time, as he always afterward 
 had at odd moments, a keen feeling of 
 the alluring charm of the life with nat 
 ure and books that was possible to him 
 at Elmwood. He was passionately fond 
 of the place, knew all the trees and all 
 the birds, and was perfectly happy in 
 
20 JAMES EUSSELL LOWELL 
 every season of the year with the good 
 gifts of nature ; and he was passionately 
 fond of books and reading of all sorts. 
 The life of a poet pure and simple, as 
 of Keats, for instance, a life devoted to 
 the love of beauty and the expression of 
 that love, was more than possible, was 
 beckoning to him. It never lost its pow 
 er entirely. Once seen as a possibility, it 
 came back to him in after years as a sort 
 of vision. 
 
 It is true that in no case would 
 Lowell s poetry have been without seri 
 ous aims and ideals. There was too much 
 Emerson and Channing in the air. There 
 was too much Transcendentalism, too, 
 to use a word which, as he afterward 
 said, was then "the maid of all work 
 for those who could not think." He 
 might have been more like Shelley than 
 Keats. 
 
 But it was his good fortune to undergo 
 a real experience. It was through Miss 
 Maria White that Lowell first perceived 
 
JAMES KUSSELL LOWELL 21 
 the claim that the Anti-slavery Move 
 ment made upon the poets of his time. 
 You may see that it did make a claim 
 upon them by glancing at the earlier 
 poems of Whittier or Holmes. It was 
 hard to escape the claim ; although Long 
 fellow at first was quite indifferent to it, 
 and Emerson at first resisted it, thinking 
 the Abolition Society one of the many 
 societies which tended to devitalize char 
 acter. Lowell also, at first, was at least 
 indifferent. In his Class Poem he had 
 even exclaimed, 
 
 "O Abolitionists, both men and maids, 
 Who leave your desks, your parlors, 
 
 and your trades, 
 To wander restless through the land 
 
 and shout 
 But few of you could tell us what 
 
 about!" 
 
 Considering, however, who and what he 
 was, he could not long hold aloof. On 
 December 26, 1844, he was married to Miss 
 White* He bad been for some years en- 
 
22 JAMES BUSSELL LOWELL 
 gaged to her. He had already felt the 
 enthusiasm that she felt ; he had already 
 begun to see that here was something 
 worth being a poet about. Shortly after 
 his marriage he began to write for the 
 Pennsylvania Freeman and the Anti-slav 
 ery Standard, and continued to write for 
 them regularly for some years. He thus 
 became accustomed to expressing himself 
 on the great and living question of the 
 day, and in scorn of the very lines which 
 have just been quoted found himself 
 writing : 
 
 " Behold the baby arrows of that wit 
 Wherewith I dared assail the wound- 
 less Truth ! 
 Love hath refilled the quiver, and 
 
 with it 
 
 The man shall win atonement for the 
 youth." 
 
 For slavery was a living question dur 
 ing the years 1844-50, the years be 
 tween the annexation of Texas and the 
 Compromise of 1850. As we look back 
 
JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL 23 
 over that episode, as we may call it, in 
 the extension of the United States to the 
 Pacific, we recollect with a little thrill of 
 surprise that in its day it was a matter 
 very different from what we vaguely think 
 it to have been. Whatever the necessi 
 ties of history, it cannot be said that the 
 Mexican War was in all respects a war to 
 be proud of. Considering the question in 
 a state of nature, without conventional 
 limitations, as of governments, treaties, 
 political parties, intrigues, and what 
 not, the main fact would seem to be 
 that here was a splendid country between 
 a living nation and one not so living. It 
 would of necessity be settled by the strong 
 er, more virile people. All this Emerson 
 saw at the time. The thing was to be, and 
 how it came about would be a matter of 
 small consequence in the course of centu 
 ries. Lowell saw it, too. He knew that 
 the English race was to spread over the 
 continent. But he hated to see the thing 
 done hypocritically, as a cloak for some- 
 
24 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL 
 thing thoroughly wrong, as a matter of 
 mean party politics. In fact, when you 
 add to the natural way of doing things 
 the existing governments and the other 
 matters mentioned, the rights and wrongs 
 become rather complicated. Of course the 
 actual facts are pretty plain. The Mexi 
 can War was put through on a Might- is- 
 Eight basis, largely for the development 
 of the Slave Power. 
 
 All this was rasping in the highest 
 degree to those who believed from the 
 bottom of their hearts that slavery was a 
 killing wrong, and of these enlightened 
 few, Lowell was now one. In the first 
 place they felt that there was an immense 
 amount of wrong in the Texas matter 
 and in the Mexican War. But, further 
 and worse, this wrong was not done to 
 bring about any good end. There was 
 for the moment no such consolation. 
 Bad in itself, the war was undertaken to 
 bring about something worse. Here it 
 was that Lowell really found his voice. 
 
JAMES KUSSELL LOWELL 25 
 In his first book there are no poems 
 which refer in any definite way to the 
 question of slavery. In this particular, 
 Lowell might as well, almost, have been 
 an Englishman. In the years that fol 
 lowed, his poems were often suggested 
 by his anti-slavery feeling. But in most 
 of these poems we see, as a rule, the lover 
 of freedom, if we can make the distinc 
 tion, rather than the hater of slavery. 
 There were a number of young poets of 
 Freedom about 1840, and in this respect 
 Lowell was merely cosmopolitan. He 
 was very ethereal, as if he had no desire 
 to deal with homely matters of the earth % / 
 Freedom, liberty, truth, these may be 
 the enthusiasms of a poet of any time 
 and nation ; but the passion of America 
 at just that moment was anti-slavery. 
 Whittier s poems have each some blow 
 |at slavery : Lowell thought rather of 
 freedom. It would seem that the slavery 
 question had not really come home to 
 him. 
 
26 JAMES KUSSELL LOWELL 
 
 The Mexican War brought it home. 
 He saw the recruiting sergeants enlist 
 lads in Boston to fight to bring more 
 slave States into the Union. He heard 
 the politicians seize eagerly upon the 
 campaign cry, " Our Country, Eight or 
 Wrong ! ? ; He heard the few Massachu 
 setts men in Congress who did venture 
 to take an independent position vilified 
 and condemned. He heard the Consti 
 tution seized and used to stamp out prin 
 ciples that had been most influential in 
 making it possible. He saw Northern 
 editors ready to print anything and 
 Northern candidates ready to promise 
 anything that would advance their par 
 ties or themselves, while the heroes of 
 the war made political capital out of any 
 thing they might or might not have done. 
 All these petty meannesses going to make 
 up a great wrong, which was being car 
 ried through by a great people for a bad 
 purpose, such was the stimulus to The 
 Biglow Papers. When we think how 
 
JAMES EUSSELL LOWELL 27 
 Lowell felt, and when we think that even 
 in ordinary moments he wrote easily and 
 well, there is little wonder that he ac 
 complished a masterpiece. 
 
 How much the inspiration coming from 
 rage at public events had to do with the 
 success of The Biglow Papers seems plain 
 enough, when we compare it with A Fable 
 for Critics and The Legend of Sir Launfalj 
 which appeared the same year. The 
 Fable is carried as far as great cleverness 
 can carry it, the Legend as far as the 
 most excellent intentions can inspire a 
 poetic nature. The Fable, when we know 
 about its subject, is quite as amusing as 
 " English Bards and Scotch Reviewers." 
 The Legend is quite as charming as Rob 
 ert of Sicily." But The Biglow Papers 
 is a masterpiece. 
 
 When Lowell wrote, 
 
 " And if my words seem treason to the 
 
 dullard and the tame, 
 <Tis but my Bay State dialect, our 
 fathers spoke the same ! ? 
 
28 JAMES EUSSELL LOWELL 
 lie was not using the word " dialect 7 in 
 the sense which The Bigloiv Papers sug 
 gest. But it was appropriate that this 
 fierce cry of scorn from the North should 
 have been couched in the uncouth dialect 
 of New England. It rang true. The 
 A Fable for Critics was in a literary form, 
 sanctioned by much good literary author 
 ity. So was The Legend of Sir Launfal. 
 For The Biglow Papers Lowell had, it is 
 true, the authority of Burns, who had 
 always been a favorite of his 5 but he 
 probably cared little for authority of 
 any kind. He conceived the idea, was 
 pleased at it, and rushed ahead. 
 
 How he realized the whole thing in his 
 mind is shown by the fulness and detail 
 of the conception as it gradually came in 
 to form. It would have been something 
 to have written the poems of Hosea Big- 
 low ; Lowell added the figure of Parson 
 Wilbur, not to mention Ezekiel Biglow 
 and Birdofredum Sawin. If Hosea 
 breathes the spirit of the Abolitionist, 
 
JAMES BUSSELL LOWELL 29 
 certainly Mr. Wilbur is a true son of the 
 Magnolia, but slightly changed to ac 
 commodate himself to a new century. 
 
 By this time Lowell had done more than 
 take his first steps: he had established 
 himself. It is true that he was not as 
 widely known now as afterward ; but, ex 
 cept for increasing ripeness of character 
 and the maturity of judgment that comes 
 as the years go, he was now what he after 
 ward became. Even when professor at 
 Harvard, he was no more of a student ; 
 when writing for the North American, he 
 was no more a critic ; when minister to 
 England, he was not more truly repre 
 sentative of his people in the mother 
 country. He often felt afterward that 
 he was never in his life more of a poet, 
 and doubtless the many who know him 
 best by the Legend of Sir Launfal will 
 agree with him. 
 
 During these years he lived in Cam 
 bridge in the old place he could never 
 leave for long, in the town which he al- 
 
30 JAMES EUSSELL LOWELL 
 ways loved, and of which he felt as proud 
 as Socrates was of Athens or Dante of 
 Florence. He lived very simply, though 
 happily, not being really even i well off, 
 but still having enough to keep a maid, 
 so that his wife did not have to make too 
 much of a slave of herself. This pleased 
 him ; for he was a consistent anti-slavery 
 man, and even girded humorously at hav 
 ing to allow Ellen to bring up water for 
 his bath, and had to circumvent her in 
 order to bring up his own coal. Some 
 thing more than anti-slavery feeling led 
 him to assume the place of nursery maid 
 to his children, when he could get a 
 chance, which they repaid in the simple 
 but effective currency which children 
 never lack. It may also be noted that 
 he kept chickens, and increased his lore 
 of more melodious birds. Yet he found 
 time not only for much reading, but for 
 much writing for the North American 
 Review, the Broadway Journal, the Mas 
 sachusetts Quarterly, the Anti- slavery 
 
JAMES BUSSELL LOWELL 31 
 
 Standard, the Pennsylvania Freeman, Put 
 nam s Magazine how curious the old 
 names look now ! poetry by prefer 
 ence, but also prose as well. 
 
 Although he was not in these earlier 
 years a very popular poet, yet he had 
 many friends. Of these friends, fortu 
 nately, one kept a diary. Longfellow 
 notes a walk withClough " to see Lowell, 
 whom we found musing before his fire in 
 his study. His wife came in, slender and 
 pale as a lily. " He writes of a supper 
 which Lowell gives to Thackeray, who was 
 then lecturing in Boston. With Emerson 
 he dines with Lowell, and they plan a new 
 club to dine together once a month. 
 
 It was a happy life, and a good one ; but 
 it had the breaks that every life must have 
 at one time or another. Of four children 
 born to him, only one lived to grow up. 
 i Death is a private tutor, ? ? he wrote after 
 ward. * * We have no fellow-scholars, and 
 must lay our lessons to heart alone. " 
 Doubtless such things are lessons, nor need 
 
32 JAMES EUSSELL LOWELL 
 
 we take it upon ourselves to feel that Low 
 ell had too many of them. In 1853, how 
 ever, came something more than a lesson. 
 His wife died. She had long been deli 
 cate, and had been often ill, but had ral 
 lied again and again. But now she died ; 
 and his life, he felt, was broken in two. 
 So far as years are concerned, he had cer 
 tainly come to near the half-way point. 
 And perhaps his life was never the same 
 again. It was larger, on the whole, more 
 brilliant, more useful, and fuller of the 
 stuff that makes men; but probably it 
 always lacked something. He sometimes 
 felt afterward that now he ceased to be a 
 poet. At such times he could hardly have 
 thought of the breadth of meaning in the 
 word, even as he had already defined it 
 himself. 
 
III. 
 
 In the A Fable for Critics Lowell had 
 mentioned himself. There is Lowell, > J 
 says he, "who is always trying to be a 
 poet, in spite of his invariable moraliz 
 ing, 7 7 or something like that. A whole 
 bale of isms," is his expression. 
 
 It would be hard to say whether Low 
 ell really thought this an incisive char 
 acterization of himself. It has often 
 been thought that it was a pity for a 
 poet to be too much of a reformer. Mil 
 ton, for instance, many people regret 
 that he should have gone hammer and 
 tongs into the pamphlet war of 1641, 
 and wish that he had stayed at Horton, 
 writing lovely poems. Probably, how 
 ever, he could never have written Para 
 dise Lost (as it now stands), had he not 
 gone into the stress of the Animadversions 
 and the Areopagitica, the Iconoclastes and 
 the Second Defence. As for Lowell, the 
 most vigorous of his " isms ?? was Aboli- 
 
34 JAMES BUSSELL LOWELL 
 tionism ; and we have seen that the re 
 sult of that was to arouse him to the 
 production of the best thing he had ever 
 done. Abolitionism had enabled him to 
 do what he had always longed to do, 
 make a real contribution to literature. 
 
 Still, not taking these lines as abso 
 lutely literal self-criticism, looking at 
 them rather as the expression of a cer 
 tain consciousness within the man of 
 what he really was, we must admit a 
 good deal of truth. Practically, we have 
 here the expression of a feeling of some 
 thing in his whole make-up that was not 
 entirely in accord with the poetic im 
 pulse. Here Lowell was certainly right. 
 There was something in his nature that 
 did not harmonize very well with the de 
 sire to put himself wholly into his poetry. 
 That something, however, was not the 
 propagandist disposition (a poet may be 
 a propagandist, for instance, Shelley) : 
 it was the disposition of the scholar. Nor 
 was Lowell the only one aware of this 
 
JAMES KUSSELL LOWELL 35 
 characteristic : it was very generally rec 
 ognized. But, then, in those days there 
 was little distinction in the general mind 
 between letters and scholarship. So it 
 did not seem very noteworthy. Longfel 
 low was a scholar. 
 
 As for Longfellow, one day in the au 
 tumn of 1853, after some hours given to 
 college work, he found his eyes suffering, 
 and made, as he had made before, a res 
 olution to retire from his professorship. 
 In the spring he begins his lectures on 
 Dante with the note, "the last course I 
 shall ever deliver. " On the 19th of 
 April he writes, " At 11 o clock in No. 
 6 University Hall I delivered my last 
 lecture, the last I shall ever deliver 
 here or any where. " But his resignation 
 does not seem to have been formally 
 acted upon until the autumn. 
 
 There were at once a number of per 
 sons " mentioned/ as the term is, as his 
 successor, all of them friends of his, 
 which precluded his devoting himself to 
 
36 JAMES KUSSELL LOWELL 
 any particular one. During the fall no 
 choice was made. 
 
 With the beginning of the new year 
 Lowell began a course of lectures on 
 English Poets in the Lowell Institute, 
 which had been founded several years be 
 fore by his kinsman, John Lowell. The 
 first lecture was given January 9, and 
 by the end of the month it was as good 
 as settled that Lowell was to be Long 
 fellow 7 s successor. The choice was recog 
 nized by everybody as most appropriate. 
 It is true that the chair had been held for 
 twenty years by Longfellow, so that the 
 fact of a poet becoming a professor was 
 not in any way a surprise. In fact, poets 
 had been professors before (Gray, for in 
 stance, although he never screwed him 
 self up to professing any thing) ; and they 
 have been professors since. It is also to 
 be remembered that a professor in those 
 days was not precisely what he generally 
 is now, when a piece of parchment is apt 
 to be thought a credential more effective 
 
JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL 37 
 
 ;than many bays of Apollo. We must not 
 think of the scholarship of our own time, 
 which is not only very unpoetic, but, on 
 the whole, much opposed to poetry : let 
 us think only of the old-time scholarship, 
 that acquaintance with the classics and 
 other polite languages which was sup 
 posed to be not only the natural desire 
 of every poet or man of letters, but also 
 his most necessary possession. Even at 
 that, the especial power which made 
 Lowell really a good professor was not a 
 power which helped his poetry. 
 
 Some time before, as has been said, 
 Lowell, then not long out of college, had 
 published in the Boston Miscellany his 
 articles on the Old English Dramatists. 
 It was thirteen years afterward that 
 he delivered his course on English 
 Poetry. Neither of these series will be 
 found among his collected works. The 
 essays on the Elizabethan Dramatists 
 which he did republish were written in 
 the last years of his life, when he re- 
 
38 JAMES KUSSELL LOWELL 
 turned to these favorites of his youth. 
 The matter of some of the Lowell lect 
 ures may practically be found in his 
 later essays on Chaucer, Spenser, Milton, 
 Pope, Wordsworth. Besides the lectures 
 on particular poets, there were some more 
 general lectures ; but these he never put 
 in print himself. 
 
 These lectures show reading and schol 
 arship, so far as English literature was 
 concerned ; but, as the Smith Professor 
 ship of Belles-lettres was practically 
 understood at that day to be a professor 
 ship of modern languages, it was natural 
 that Lowell should have desired to brush 
 up his German and Italian. He accord 
 ingly went abroad for two years, and 
 only in 1856 did he assume the chair 
 that had been held by Ticknor and 
 Longfellow. When he did return, he as 
 sumed other duties as well. But, before 
 we speak of the Atlantic Monthly and his 
 career as editor there begun, we must 
 say a word or two more on Lowell s 
 
JAMES KUSSELL LOWELL 39 
 scholarship. If he had not been a 
 scholar, he would not have become a pro- 
 
 \ fessor ; and, if he had not become a pro 
 fessor, as he was apt to think himself, he 
 would have been a greater poet. "I 
 believe the present generation doesn t 
 
 i think I was made for a poet," he wrote 
 at a later time to Mr. Ho wells; "but I 
 
 i think I could have gone near convincing 
 ? em if I had not estranged the muse by 
 donning a professor s gown." This, 
 
 ! then, was an important point in his 
 
 Ilife. 
 
 Lowell is less remembered as a scholar 
 than as an essayist, a poet, a critic, or, as 
 what we may call for want of a better 
 
 j name, a man of letters. So far as con 
 cerns those best qualified to remember 
 (namely, other scholars), he is as a schol 
 ar best remembered for the spirit, the im- 
 
 l pulse, the encouragement, which he gave 
 scholarship rather than for any partic 
 ular work. You will find little reference 
 to learned works of his on Shakspere or 
 
40 JAMES KUSSELL LOWELL 
 Chaucer. In fact, lie wrote no learned 
 works. " Produce the books," is the 
 demand on any one who would have it 
 that one or another is a scholar. Lowell 
 wrote no treatises ; and, so far as current 
 scholarship is concerned, he is pretty 
 much as though he had never been. 
 For this there are several reasons. In the 
 first place, scholarship, in the particu 
 lar line in which he was undoubtedly 
 learned, is a very different thing from 
 what it was forty years ago. The very 
 fact that Lowell, when he went abroad 
 before assuming his professorship, spent 
 a winter in Dresden, studying German, is 
 almost enough in itself without any fur 
 ther comment. In his day men went to 
 Germany to Dresden, if they chose to 
 study German : in ours they go there to 
 study French and English. Of the kind 
 of learning of which our professors of 
 modern languages have accumulated 
 much, Lowell had little : nor need we 
 pause even to think why. 
 
JAMES KUSSELL LOWELL 41 
 Lowell s scholarship was not the schol 
 arship of to-day. He had but a dim 
 conception of language as it exists at 
 the universities to-day ; or of literature, 
 either, I had almost added. His ideas 
 on language were, on the whole, such as 
 he gained by reading the literature of 
 any language in question for the moment. 
 Further he had no especial care to go, 
 so far as I can find out. As for the lin 
 guistic studies of his contemporary, 
 Whitney, I presume that he regarded 
 them as having especial connection with 
 Sanskrit or Zend. 
 
 There is much to be said in favor of 
 scholarship of Lowell s type, even so far 
 as language only is concerned. When a 
 man learns a language from its poets and 
 its great prose writers, he knows it in a 
 manner very different from that which 
 i comes chiefly from a study of grammars 
 and dictionaries and treatises. He has a 
 more real appreciation of it. He misses 
 a possible doctrinaire character : he is 
 
42 JAMES EUSSELL LOWELL 
 
 more apt to see things in right relation. 
 Now Lowell had learned English and Old 
 French chiefly by reading English and 
 Old French. He used to read and mark 
 his books constantly, and the scattered 
 notes he sometimes went over and in 
 dexed. Learning of this sort, learning 
 based upon one s own marks and indexes, 
 is something very different from a learn 
 ing based on the marks and indexes that 
 another man has made. Now that we 
 have so many texts well edited and so 
 many monographs, any recent graduate 
 can have certainly a much broader range 
 of scholarship than was possible to Low 
 ell ; but the temptation is very strong to 
 be content with a scholarship that stands 
 lightly on the texts, as one might say, 
 and is not rooted in them, even if it does 
 not now and then go so far as to leave 
 texts altogether for a flight upward into 
 the regions of phonology and analogy. 
 Lowell had the simple scholarship that 
 is satisfied with knowing languages so as 
 
JAMES EUSSELL LOWELL 43 
 
 to be able to feel their genius and with 
 -knowing literatures so as to be able to 
 luse them in thinking. As to sound laws 
 Sand analogical formations, inquiries 
 [about sources and influences, I find no 
 s allusion to these matters in his works, 
 land do not believe that they found any 
 [place in his lectures. His scholarship 
 [was of the old-time sort that came in 
 j with Petrarch. We might say of him 
 iwhat he said of Longfellow: "Mr. 
 Longfellow is not a scholar in the Ger 
 man sense of the word, that is to say, 
 he is no pedant, but he certainly is a 
 scholar in another and perhaps a higher 
 sense : I mean in range of acquirement 
 ( and the flavor that comes from it. ? ? This 
 is a little hard on German scholarship, 
 but just here we may let that pass. 
 
 But how, one may ask, if LowelPs 
 | scholarship was the scholarship of Pe 
 trarch and Poliziano, of Ben Jonson and 
 Milton, of Pope and Johnson, how is it 
 that it was a bar to his poetical temper ? 
 
44 JAMES EUSSELL LOWELL 
 Any one will understand why a modern 
 scholar, a scientist, a discoverer of laws 
 and of sources, should not at the same 
 time be a poet. There is a very distinct 
 opposition in the two modes of thought. 
 One is bound to discover what actually 
 has been and to conform his thinking to 
 it; and the other allows his thinking 
 to take care of itself, or, rather, he trusts 
 to his own springs of feeling, and brings 
 to pass things that conform to it. That is 
 a considerable difference : the man who 
 is good at one is not likely to be good at 
 the other. Well, Lowell was certainly not 
 a thorough- paced scientific scholar (if he 
 had been, he would probably have written 
 no poems at all) ; but he had enough of 
 the passion for seeing how things actually 
 were, to stand at times in the way of his 
 realizing things as he imagined them. 
 This is the way I explain the fact that 
 he was often out of poetic trim, that he 
 could only write when he felt like it. 
 He had two natures, the critical and the 
 
JAMES EUSSELL LOWELL 45 
 creative, it is rather the fashion to call 
 them ; and they seem to have existed in 
 pretty nearly equal degree, though not 
 by any means in equal balance. When 
 I say " critical," I do not mean that 
 Lowell was necessarily what we should 
 call a great critic. I mean that he had 
 that faculty of mind that is not only con 
 tent, but especially desires, to consider 
 the work of other men and see what it 
 is. A man in whom this spirit is pre 
 dominant rarely creates much himself, 
 in the common understanding of the 
 word; and, wherever the disposition is 
 strong, it is apt to interfere with the 
 writing of poetry. 
 
 In another, a minor way, does the dif 
 ference show. A scholar must be dili 
 gent. Lowell sometimes was : he worked 
 hard in Dresden to learn German as he 
 wanted to know it ; he worked at other 
 times, too, once ten hours a day for two 
 months, making verbal indexes for Mid 
 dle English poems ; and he must have 
 
46 JAMES EUSSELL LOWELL 
 
 done many more things of the same sort. 
 His friends tell me that he was indolent 
 of disposition, but a scholar who knows 
 as much as Lowell did cannot have been 
 indolent all the time. You cannot learn 
 languages by inspiration. On the other 
 hand, you can write poetry in that way ; 
 and Lowell generally did. "Sir Laun- 
 fal " is said to have been written in two 
 days and nights, and the "Commemo 
 ration Ode" in about the same time. 
 "The Cathedral" he wrote and then 
 rewrote, but finally came back to the 
 first draught. Even the "Class Poem" 
 was done under the stress of time. 
 When he got thoroughly aroused, then 
 he could write, and preferably poetry. 
 It is true that for all this a great deal of 
 preparation was necessary. " My brain 
 requires a long brooding time," said he, 
 "ere it can hatch anything. As soon 
 as the life comes into the thing, it is 
 quick enough in chipping the shell." 
 Or, to reverse the figure, you can make 
 
JAMES EUSSELL LOWELL 47 
 a coal glow very soon ; but it has taken 
 a good while to make the coal. This 
 temper, not the white heat necessarily, 
 but the general mood, he felt sure was 
 his real temper. Certainly, it may have 
 been. Our concern here is that it was 
 not his only temper. 
 
 Of another critic he writes : "I find, 
 somewhat to my surprise, from his let 
 ters, that he had the imaginative temper 
 in all its force. Can t work for months 
 together : if he tries, his forehead drips 
 with Angstschweiss ; feels ill and looks 
 well, in short, is as pure a hypochon 
 driac as the best. This has had a kind 
 of unhealthy interest for me, for I never 
 read my own symptoms so well described 
 before." 
 
 One is rather too apt to catch the idea 
 from Lowell s own writings or from his 
 friends that at bottom he disliked be 
 ing a professor and wished to be always 
 a poet. This cannot have been the case. 
 Doubtless, Lowell disliked the work nee- 
 
48 JAMES EUSSELL LOWELL 
 essary to get his materials into regu 
 lar, scholarly shape ; he disliked the 
 labor of writing lectures and the ordeal 
 of delivering them ; he disliked the 
 bother and confinement of college order. 
 But he was passionately fond of the study 
 of language, or, more exactly, of words 
 not as fossil poetry, to use Emerson s 
 phrase, but as words. Speaking of Per- 
 civaPs linguistic tastes, he says, " Who 
 ever has been bitten by that gadfly 
 knows that there is scarce a monomania 
 so utterly absorbing." No one will pre 
 tend that Lowell s linguistic studies were 
 not absolutely whole-hearted. Mr. Les 
 lie Stephen, in 1863, found him at first 
 " a singularly complete specimen of the 
 literary recluse," sitting among books, 
 whose ragged and thumbed appearance 
 and well-pencilled margins showed how 
 constantly he had used them. 
 
 If he had not loved his work devot 
 edly, Lowell would never have accom 
 plished as much as he did. And, wheth- 
 
JAMES BUSSELL LOWELL 49 
 er lie were more truly a scholar or a poet, 
 we must not close this section without a 
 word upon the soundest bit of linguistic 
 scholarship which he ever put forth. 
 You will not find it in his published 
 essays : there is nothing there so im 
 portant from a linguistic point of view. 
 It is in an unlikely place; i.e., pre 
 fixed to the second series of The Biglow 
 Papers. 
 
 This paper is scholarly because it 
 shows the genius of the scholar. It says 
 things that have not gained currency in 
 America even now. It shows an intui 
 tive knowledge of some of the funda 
 mental positions on which the science of 
 language is based. It is true that it 
 shows much else not so valuable. But 
 when Lowell saw that the spoken word 
 is the basis, not the written, that exact 
 chronology must be regarded in tracing 
 etymologies, that by comparing later 
 forms you can infer earlier ones, he had 
 found out the very things that were 
 
50 JAMES EUSSELL LOWELL 
 
 needed to make him one of the great 
 linguists of the day. Unfortunately for 
 his brother scholars, he was not aware of 
 this fact. 
 
IV. 
 
 IN the town of Goettingen there are 
 tablets placed upon the houses where 
 George Ticknor lived, and Edward Ev 
 erett, George Bancroft, and John Lothrop 
 Motley. But the American visitor will 
 find no tablet over the door of Kleine 
 Schiessgasse, 4, Dresden. To tell the 
 truth, Lowell was never very much of a 
 German student, and never cared much 
 for German student life : in fact, so far 
 as I know, he never saw anything of it. 
 He was rather old for it at the time, 
 he was thirty-seven ; and he was past 
 boyish enthusiasms, as for duelling and 
 drinking, and anxious to get from Ger 
 many what he wanted (namely, a knowl 
 edge of the language and literature) as 
 soon as possible. It was rather a grind 
 for him in Dresden than otherwise. 
 In fact, he says it was one of the most 
 miserable winters that he ever passed. 
 The reason is not very far to seek : he 
 
52 JAMES EUSSELL LOWELL 
 had to talk German. Now, for a man 
 who is so easy and natural and predes 
 tined a talker as Lowell was, it is a ter 
 rible thing to be able to talk nothing but 
 a language that you cannot quite man 
 age. At first it condemns you to com 
 monplace. Afterward it deprives your 
 remarks of the true outline and charac 
 ter. Anyway, it makes an effort of a 
 natural necessity. 
 
 But, if Lowell did not like Dresden 
 much, he did, at least, learn German ; 
 and that was what he had come for. It 
 would not seem, however, that he ever 
 really cared much for the language or 
 the literature. In one of his letters of 
 this time he says that the history of the 
 German literature is most interesting, 
 and that it makes many things in Eng 
 lish literature clearer to him. Lowell 
 was not the man to go through such a 
 winter as a mere grind. At the time he 
 may have thought that he got something 
 out of German literature. But, really, 
 
JAMES EUSSELL LOWELL 53 
 j could have made no great impression 
 n him. It is true that some years after- 
 d he read the correspondence of Less- 
 ig and wrote an article on the subject, 
 ut German literature never had any 
 reat place in his mind. You can hard- 
 
 find an allusion to German literature 
 r any mention of it in all his essays, so 
 Lch in allusions to English and French. 
 
 remember half a dozen references to 
 roethe and one or two to Heine ; but 
 therwise, however much German liter- 
 ture illuminated English in Lowell s 
 lind, its light was by no means reflected 
 o his readers. 
 
 In the summer of 1856 Lowell came 
 ome, and, the house at Elmwood being 
 bill leased, took up his abode in what 
 ras called " Professors Bow." For the 
 aoment he was plunged into preparation 
 or college work. He had to select in- 
 tructors for the practical teaching of 
 lie modern languages (there were four 
 of them, for French, German, Italian, 
 
54 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL 
 and Spanish, respectively); and he had 
 to prepare his own lectures, which were 
 on the literatures. The first duty he 
 managed in spite of the immigrations of 
 Teutons, Swiss, Hungarians, and Poles, 
 who were "all desirous [especially the 
 last three] to teach the German lan 
 guage at Cambridge. 77 The second he 
 accomplished by revising his Lowell 
 lectures and preparing courses on Dante 
 and German Literature. 
 
 College society at that time was agree 
 able. We get rather more of an idea o1 
 it from Longfellow s diary than from 
 Lowell s letters, probably because it is a 
 diary, for one thing, and perhaps, also, 
 because Lowell kept a little more to 
 himself, for another. For in a year 01 
 two Lowell moved back to Elmwood 
 and, not being very enterprising in mi 
 nor matters, he used to stay there a gooc 
 deal. One more reason there was, how 
 ever : he had now very little time t( 
 give his friends. He had not been ai 
 
JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL 55 
 home very long before lie assumed the 
 editorship of a new periodical to be 
 founded, namely, the Atlantic Monthly, 
 of which the first number was issued 
 in November, 1857. 
 
 The reader who wishes to get the right 
 idea of this important element in Low- 
 elFs life must for the moment forget 
 the present stately and Bostonian isola 
 tion of the Atlantic among the more 
 popular and beautifully illustrated maga 
 zines. The Atlantic Monthly, as then pro 
 jected, was not eccentric among (Ameri 
 can) magazines. It was conceived on 
 lines that had already obtained very 
 generally, only put up perhaps a little 
 higher. It was (as it is) literary, the 
 difference being that in those days mag 
 azines were supposed to be literary. 
 What would be the success of a maga 
 zine at the present day which was ed 
 ited by a college professor and had for 
 star contributors only the greatest poet, 
 the chief philosopher, and the wittiest 
 
56 JAMES EUSSELL LOWELL 
 observer in the country, might be a 
 problem, unless it were meant to ap 
 peal to a very limited constituency. 
 But in Lowell s day illustrations were 
 in their infancy, and journalism confined 
 itself largely to the journals, so that a 
 magazine edited by Lowell with the help 
 of Longfellow, Emerson, and Holmes, had 
 rather a better chance than it would to 
 day. 
 
 It is curious to look over the first vol 
 umes Lowell edited seven and see 
 what is there. Everything is anony 
 mous ; and it gives one a little thrill, 
 therefore, to see on the same page in the 
 first number the mystic "If the red 
 slayer thinks he slays, " followed by 
 "The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table : 
 Every Man his ownBoswell," appearing 
 as calmly as if wholly ignorant that they 
 were to be classics. One may also won 
 der what the readers of the first number 
 thought of " Brahma " : they were prob 
 ably better attuned to it than we are. 
 
JAMES EUSSELL LOWELL 57 
 In the second number you may see on 
 successive pages " Floyd Ireson s Bide" 
 and " Society and Solitude, " and a little 
 later the essay on the t( Library of Old 
 Authors J following i Sandalphon. 
 Mot that the whole of the Atlantic was 
 made up of such matters. A good deal 
 of it is not so very interesting. But, out 
 of over a hundred articles in the first 
 volume, one may count probably more 
 than a score that everybody remembers 
 after forty years, which seems a large 
 percentage. 
 
 Of Lowell s own articles in these first 
 numbers there will be a word to say 
 later. They were not the star articles, 
 as his used to be later in the North Ameri 
 can Review. I suppose this was because 
 he had to do much of the editor s work 
 himself, and found that together with his 
 college work it took up all his time. In 
 his letters you may find a good many 
 snatches which give a good idea of his 
 trials. I like best this one, written to 
 
58 JAMES BUSSELL LOWELL 
 Mr. James T. Fields after he had given 
 up his position. u You asked the other 
 day for an article on Birds 7 Nests. I 
 don t find it, and think it must have been 
 made into soup for a blue- buttoned Man 
 darin that dropped in to dinner. What 
 could I do ? Eats were not to be had on 
 such short notice. That is my theory. 
 Practically, it may turn up some day, 
 like Mr. Brown s Genius, when I had 
 given up all hopes of ever seeing it 
 again." It was certainly hard enough 
 to find good articles and see that they 
 were rightly printed. Too much was it, 
 we shall agree with Lowell, to remem 
 ber what had happened to the other 
 ones. 
 
 One may imagine vaguely that the 
 duty of the editor of the Atlantic in 
 those days was merely to go around once 
 a month and get poems and articles from 
 Longfellow and the other famous authors 
 and household favorites, and print them. 
 This would be a mistaken notion. To 
 
JAMES EUSSELL LOWELL 59 
 tell the truth, Longfellow was not at 
 first very enthusiastic ; and to the two- 
 score numbers edited by Lowell he con 
 tributed only about a dozen poems, and 
 those mostly to the first volume. Emer 
 son also sent several things to the first 
 volume, but very few after that ; and the 
 same thing may be said of Whittier. 
 As for Motley and Cabot, who had been 
 at the foundation dinner, they wrote 
 each two articles in Lowell s day. "Now 
 there had to be in those seven volumes 
 about a thousand articles, less rather 
 than more. Of this thousand Lowell 
 himself wrote a good many, the majority 
 being reviews of books, though some of 
 these were practically articles, and were 
 republished in his essays. And, of 
 course, his right-hand man was Holmes. 
 He had himself said on starting that 
 Dr. Holmes was to be the main stay, and 
 he certainly was. The Autocrat made a 
 great hit, and was followed by the Pro 
 fessor, and that by Elsie Venner under 
 
60 JAMES EUSSELL LOWELL 
 the name of The Professor s Story. Next 
 as a reliance came probably Mr. Charles 
 Eliot Norton : at any rate, he did a good 
 deal of work. And Lowell soon found 
 that Thomas Wentworth Higginson (not 
 yet Colonel) was a stalwart helper. 
 These four, I suppose, must have written 
 about a third of the Atlantic, between 
 them, during the years of Lowell s edi 
 torship. With such a reliance an editor, 
 though of a new venture, could sleep 
 easily of nights, even if he did get but 
 a poem or so now and then from Long 
 fellow, Whittier, Emerson, and himself. 
 Besides these, however, there were 
 many others whose names are now very 
 familiar. From New York were Bayard 
 Taylor and Parke Godwin, who wrote 
 the first political articles. Some younger 
 men appeared in time, as Fitz-James 
 O Brien and Theodore Winthrop. Most 
 noteworthy as a group were certain New 
 Englanders : not only the most famous 
 of all New England authors, Harriet 
 
JAMES EUSSELL LOWELL 61 
 Beecher Stowe, who had been reckoned 
 npon from the start, for, as time went on, 
 editorial sagacity recognized Eose Terry, 
 Harriet Prescott, the " wonderful young 
 girl" who wrote The Amber Gods, and 
 Elizabeth Stuart Phelps. Anonymously, 
 I may also mention the authors of The 
 Queen of the Bed Chessman and of My 
 Double, and How He Undid Me. 
 
 But, of all the articles in the Atlantic in 
 those days, none has a more curious in 
 terest for me than certain poems that be 
 gan to appear in the fifth volume. You 
 may know them by the mottoes from 
 Heine, or, if there be no mottoes, you 
 may know them by keeping Heine in 
 mind. They came from what was then the 
 West, namely, Columbus, and were 
 in due time followed by their author, who 
 wished to make the acquaintance of the 
 New England literati. Lowell received 
 him cordially, and made a little dinner 
 for him at Parker s, the table being made 
 up of Mr. Fields and Dr. Holmes. The 
 
62 JAMES BUSSELL LOWELL 
 latter seems to have been the only one 
 who divined the true significance of the 
 occasion. "Well, James, " said he, 
 "this is something like the apostolic suc 
 cession : this is the laying on of hands." 
 Probably no one of the four thought at 
 the time that, as Lowell himself had suc 
 ceeded to the primacy in letters held by 
 Irving, so he was to pass on the respon 
 sibility to William Dean Howells. 
 
V. 
 
 WE sometimes hear the expression 
 " pure literature " used, meaning litera 
 ture that is without contamination from 
 politics or religion or such things. 
 This, on the whole, was not precisely 
 LowelPs idea of literature. Indeed, his 
 best literary work so far had had its con 
 nection with public events. Nor had 
 the Atlantic been founded merely for 
 "pure literature " : it was (as it is) a 
 "Magazine devoted to Literature, Art, 
 and Politics. " "Science" was intro 
 duced in time. In those days politics 
 were very interesting at least, they were 
 about the time of the founding of the 
 Atlantic; and they were also three and 
 four years later. Mr. Francis H. Under 
 wood, who ought to know, for he was 
 actively concerned in founding the At- 
 lantiCy says that "one purpose of the 
 magazine was to give the active sup 
 port of letters to the anti-slavery cause." 
 
64 JAMES EUSSELL LOWELL 
 
 Doubtless this was so. A magazine in 
 which Lowell and Whittier and Mrs. 
 Stowe wrote (not to mention others) 
 would certainly have given literary sup 
 port, even if indirectly, to the anti-sla 
 very cause. But at the beginning the 
 Atlantic was to be directly political ; and 
 in the first volume will be found several 
 articles on political subjects, written, as 
 has been said, by Mr. Parke Godwin, 
 who had been for some time a writer for 
 the New York Evening Post. 
 
 I cannot say just what was the im 
 pression of these articles. Mr. Godwin 
 wrote only for the first six numbers. In 
 the number for August, 1858, appeared 
 an article in a somewhat different style, 
 entitled "The Pocket Celebration of the 
 Fourth. 7 Unsigned, according to cus 
 tom, it was probably at once recog 
 nized as being by Lowell. It was cer 
 tainly an excellent exhibition of Lowell s 
 true manner in prose. He had always 
 said, and doubtless with perfect truth, 
 
JAMES BUSSELL LOWELL 65 
 that prose (his best prose, he meant) 
 was really harder for him to write than 
 poetry. But this article he must have 
 written with a very flowing pen. It was 
 a sharp criticism of a speech by Eufus 
 Choate : it may still be read with great 
 amusement, even though we have almost 
 forgotten what it is all about. And it is 
 not merely an attack : Lowell really ap 
 preciated much that was fine in Eufus 
 Choate, and what he has to say on this 
 side is as good as what he has to say on 
 the other. The article took, not wholly 
 to LowelFs pleasure. " These personal 
 things are not such as I should choose to 
 do," he wrote in a letter, " for they sub 
 ject me to all manner of vituperation ; 
 but one must take what immediate texts 
 the newspapers afford him, and I ac 
 cepted the responsibility in accepting my 
 post. 7 On another text afforded him 
 by current events he wrote shortly after 
 ward another article, this time on Caleb 
 Cushing ("Gineral C." of The Biglow 
 
66 JAMES KUSSELL LOWELL 
 Papers), not so good, lie thought himself, 
 and probably with reason. Perhaps it 
 was not so spontaneous. 
 
 However it was, Lowell wrote no more 
 on politics for some time, nor, indeed, 
 on any other matter that now has great 
 interest. His articles were largely book 
 reviews. His editorship and his pro 
 fessorship* evidently were taking all his 
 time and energy, and there was little left 
 to spare. But the Presidential election 
 of 1860, and the events of the beginning 
 of 1861, were things that made a call on 
 a man. Lowell responded with "The 
 November Election/ "The Question of 
 the Hour," "E Pluribus Unum," "The 
 Pickens-and-Stealin> s Eebellion, " the 
 last in June, 1861, by which time Lowell 
 had already given up the editorship of 
 the Atlantic to Mr. James T. Fields. 
 
 On these political articles it would not 
 be easy to form a critical opinion to-day, 
 even if it were necessary for our present 
 purposes. They are praised by some 
 
JAMES EUSSELL LOWELL 67 
 who read them when they came out ; and 
 Lowell included them in his Works, al 
 though they were not republished at the 
 time. It does not seem to me that they 
 are written in just the tone for such a 
 time : they seem hardly vital enough. 
 "My very style/ he wrote later, " be 
 longs to the last century. 7 It is one 
 thing to stir up the prevalent opinion of 
 a political adversary by good-natured 
 ridicule and common sense, but some 
 thing more is needed in a crisis such as 
 that of the first months of 1861. These 
 articles had something more ; but still, 
 as I read them, it seems as if they did 
 not have all that was needed. 
 
 With his handing over the editorship 
 of the Atlantic to Mr. Fields, LowelPs 
 mind must have turned to poetry. Mr. 
 Norton urged him to read poetry ; and 
 probably, now that he had more time, he 
 did so. Constant and regular work is 
 apt to be a great dissuader from much 
 reading of peetry. But, even had he 
 
68 JAMES EUSSELL LOWELL 
 still been responsible for the Atlantic, it 
 is probable that his mind would have 
 naturally turned to the idea of more 
 "Biglow Papers. " The first series, 
 edited in England not long before by 
 Thomas Hughes, would have recalled the 
 idea to him, had it been necessary. But 
 it was not necessary ; and nothing gives a 
 better idea of how completely the first 
 series of The Biglow Papers had done its 
 work than that it seemed to so many 
 natural, when there was a call for a rep 
 resentative of the patriotic North, that 
 Hosea Biglow should be heard from. 
 For a year and more he was heard from. 
 In November, 1861, was a letter from 
 Birdofredum Sawin ; and from time to 
 time thereafter till Christmas, 1862, 
 when the Rev. Mr. Wilbur died, there 
 were seven numbers. The other num 
 bers in the second series were written 
 in 1866. 
 
 The second series of The Biglow Papers 
 is not so often read as the first^ and I 
 
JAMES EUSSELL LOWELL 69 
 suppose is not so good. It may have 
 been for the general reason that revivals 
 are always dangerous. Lowell hints at 
 this himself, although in later years he 
 thought that there were more staying 
 qualities in the second series than in the 
 first. It may also have been that Low 
 ell was a professor now, and fifteen years 
 older than he had been when he wrote 
 the earlier poems. It may have been, 
 and I believe it mainly was, because it 
 was one thing to write of the Mexican 
 "War in opposition to it and quite an- 
 another to write in the midst of the agony 
 of the Civil War. I do not wonder 
 that the second Biglow Papers are not 
 equal to the first. The first series was 
 satirical : what was there for the second 
 to be satirical about! The real time to 
 stir men to right feeling and right action 
 by satire and ridicule was the time be 
 tween the nomination of Lincoln and the 
 first battle of Bull Eun. After Bull Eun 
 the time was not wholly adapted for 
 
70 JAMES BUSSELL LOWELL 
 satire. Lowell had poetry for the war, 
 but it was not satirical poetry. 
 
 And yet here and there is a chance 
 for the old fire. What, in the first series, 
 is better than " Jonathan to John," or, 
 in another way, than some of the stanzas 
 added to "The Courtin 7 " ! 
 
 But the year 1862 was not a good year 
 for Lowell to write poetry. In October, 
 1861, Lieutenant William Lowell Put 
 nam was wounded at Ball s Bluff, and 
 died a few days after. In June, 1862, 
 Captain James Jackson Lowell was mor 
 tally wounded at Glendale. In the No 
 vember of that year Colonel Charles 
 Bussell Lowell was killed in a skirmish 
 at Cedar Creek. These three young 
 nephews were an immense loss to Lowell. 
 He had no sons of his own, but he felt 
 the deaths of these sons of his brother 
 and of his sister almost as if they had 
 been of those dearest to him. Some years 
 before, looking over to Mount Auburn 
 as the snow fell on the graves there, he 
 
JAMES EUSSELL LOWELL 71 
 kissed his daughter Mabel ; but he says 
 that she could not know 
 
 "That my kiss was given to her sister 
 Folded close under deepening snow. 77 
 
 And these lines may give us a sense of 
 the feeling of personal loss that lies be 
 neath those which are so well known in 
 the No. X. of The Biglow Papers, writ 
 ten after the war was over. 
 
 Still, like every other big-hearted man 
 at the North, Lowell, in spite of his per 
 sonal losses, had a heart for his country 
 in everything ; and there was one point 
 on which his satire could justly be 
 turned, namely, the position of Eng 
 land. We cannot easily understand how 
 keenly Lowell felt the hostile attitude 
 of England (in fact, at this moment we 
 are rather inclined to forget the whole 
 matter) unless we remember how proud 
 he was, not only of his own country, but 
 of the country from which it had chiefly 
 sprung* For, though so many of us now 
 
72 JAMES KUSSELL LOWELL 
 
 are Swedes, Hungarians, Poles, and 
 Italians, still, as a people, we feel that 
 our true descent is from England ; and 
 in LowelFs time the feeling was much 
 stronger, and he felt it more keenly. 
 Nothing that France could have done, 
 although an old friend, could have been 
 so galling. For England to side with 
 the South seemed to the North like be 
 ing thrown down by one who should have 
 helped you stand firm. But all this 
 merely served to bring out more strong 
 ly LowelFs loyalty to his country and 
 his faith in her final success. 
 
 Toward the end of the year 1863 
 Lowell, together with Mr. Charles Eliot 
 Norton, assumed the editorship of the 
 North American Review. "It wanted 
 three elements to be successful," he 
 wrote to Motley in Vienna. "It wasn t 
 thoroughly that is, thick and thinly 
 loyal, it wasn t lively, and it had no 
 particular opinions on any particular 
 subject. 77 To make it loyal was no dif- 
 
JAMES BUSSELL LOWELL 73 
 ficult task. Lowell again turned his 
 hand to political articles, and wrote first 
 the article on "The President s Policy/ 7 
 which may be found with some additions 
 in the present essay on Abraham Lincoln. 
 For three years, then, he wrote political 
 articles, on through the rest of the war 
 and into the reconstruction period. For 
 work such as this guiding and restrain 
 ing work his sound sense and his high 
 ideals gave him great power, and he used 
 it. Mr. Norton also contributed a num 
 ber of political articles ; and, although 
 the question of being " thick and thinly 
 loyal " happily passed away with the 
 course of events, yet the North American 
 Review continued to hold a strong posi 
 tion in public affairs. After 1866, how 
 ever, Lowell s articles were no longer 
 political. 
 
 In 1865 came peace. On receiving 
 the news, Lowell wrote to Mr. Norton : 
 "The news, my dear Charles, is from 
 heaven. I felt a strange and tender ex- 
 
74 JAMES BUSSELL LOWELL 
 altation. I wanted to laugh and I 
 wanted to cry, and ended by holding 
 my peace and feeling devoutly thankful. 
 There is something magnificent in hav 
 ing a country to love." Now, as was 
 his custom, the feelings that had been 
 maturing so long were ready to find 
 expression ; and an occasion offered 
 itself at once. On Commencement of 
 that year Harvard College held com 
 memoration exercises for those of her 
 sons who had fallen in the war, and 
 Lowell was naturally called upon for the 
 Ode. Hardly had Harvard herself lost 
 more noble sons than he. 
 
 He gave himself up to it as he had not 
 given himself up to anything for ten 
 years. This was his way, this was the 
 way he felt he could write poetry, and 
 only in this way. "To carry a thing 
 long in the mind is my recipe. It settles 
 and clarifies, and you have only to tap it, 
 and draw it off the lees." He could not 
 easily get started; but, once going, he 
 
JAMES EUSSELL LOWELL 75 
 relieved his heart and mind by verse that 
 was almost improvisation. When it 
 was done, he felt satisfied: he felt, and 
 rightly, that he had again written poetry. 
 At the moment he thought that the 
 poem did not make the effect on the 
 audience that he had looked for : he said 
 gloomily, that the Daily Advertiser of the 
 next day had called it " a very graceful 
 poem." He fell into the unhappiness 
 that often follows the heat of enthusiasm. 
 He thought he had failed. "The fact 
 is," he wrote to Colonel Higginson, 
 " that the Ode was written at a heat, 
 such a one, indeed, as leaves one colder 
 than common afterwards. But here he 
 must have been not unnaturally wrong, 
 at least, if the testimony of others is of 
 any value. The Ode was not only fully 
 equal to the occasion, not only listened 
 to with exultation by those who at last 
 felt due utterance of the emotion of 
 years, but it was also the best, the great 
 est poem that he had written. It has his 
 
76 JAMES EUSSELL LOWELL 
 greatest merits, and it lacks his defects. 
 It is also thoroughly representative of 
 the moods and the feeling of the poet, 
 and of the people for whom he acted as 
 spokesman. 
 
VI. 
 
 "I AM ashamed at having been again 
 tempted into thinking I could write po 
 etry, a delusion from which I have been 
 tolerably free these dozen years." So 
 wrote Lowell in the reaction which fol 
 lowed the composition of his greatest 
 poem. " These dozen years" bring us 
 back to the year 1853, the year he was 
 meditating those lectures on the English 
 Poets which showed that no other could 
 rightly be the successor of Longfellow. 
 During these years of work as a profes 
 sor, and afterward as an editor, he had 
 frequently felt a lack of poetic power. 
 And, although this feeling was frequently 
 shaken by a fine verse or a fine poem, 
 yet we can easily see that there was 
 ground for it. If you spend ten hours 
 out of the twenty-four in hard intellect 
 ual work, you are less likely to write 
 poetry than if you do not. That is about 
 the way we may look at the question. It 
 
78 JAMES BUSSELL LOWELL 
 is true that about this time Lowell was be 
 ginning to feel a sort of compensation : 
 he was beginning to contribute to the 
 North American Review those essays on 
 the great figures of literature of which 
 it will be soon time to speak. But, cer 
 tainly, he often had the feeling that his 
 days as a poet were numbered. It was 
 not for two or three years yet that he re 
 gained his surety of feeling enough to 
 collect what he had written since his last 
 volume. 
 
 To this collection he gave the name 
 Under the Willows, not only as the title 
 of the June Idyl that came first, but 
 because the poems called back so many 
 moods knit into Elmwood, and those 
 willows which he then feared were soon 
 to become a thing of the past. He did 
 not think too highly of them, when he 
 had got them all together ; but he felt 
 that he should feel freer, were they once 
 between covers. He was apt to feel this 
 way. In 1847 he wrote: "My pieces 
 
JAMES EUSSELL LOWELL 79 
 hamper me till I get them shut up in a 
 book. Then I feel free of them, and can 
 do better. " Twenty years after he says, 
 although, to tell the truth, not of all of the 
 poems, i i I was mainly induced to print 
 them that I might get rid of them by 
 shutting them between two covers." 
 
 But this collection of the actual year- 
 to-year record of twenty years feelings 
 and thoughts is somehow less real than 
 the poetical review of which it may well 
 have been the cause. I have seen The 
 Cathedral criticised as not having been 
 spontaneous. I can hardly think that 
 this can have been so. In his own 
 letters he says, "I was happy writing 
 it." But the poem itself is better evi 
 dence than anything one can say about 
 it. It is not generally thought the best 
 of Lowell s poems ; but read it at just 
 this moment of his life, and see whether 
 he ever wrote anything more thoroughly/ 
 himself. That may not be a very sound 
 basis for literary criticism ; but for us 
 
80 JAMES EUSSELL LOWELL 
 now, who are concerned in seeing how 
 the life of Lowell shaped itself and de 
 veloped, it is surely to the purpose. 
 The name "The Cathedral 7 is acciden 
 tal. It would be more accurately named 
 in prose, James Eussell Lowell, the 
 Poet, and his Eelation to his Time." 
 
 That is to say, in this poem Lowell 
 found voice after many years of partial 
 utterance, of half-silence, found in the 
 recollection of a trivial day abroad the 
 subtle alchemy which distilled from so 
 many moods, so many memories, the pure 
 quintessence which the world might 
 keep. Nothing else that he ever wrote 
 expresses so fully his poetical nature, 
 that part of himself which he often (be 
 fore and afterward) felt was the real 
 himself. Everything is there : nature, 
 religion, art, the past, democracy ; early 
 enthusiasms, even the contradiction of 
 poetry and scholarship, the pressure of 
 daily labors, the war, the doubts of re 
 construction times j the half- diffuse ex- 
 
JAMES BUSSELL LOWELL 81 
 uberance, the quaint figure, the incon 
 gruous whimsicality or triviality, the 
 happy turn and word, even satire, 
 though satire is generally dissolved in 
 feeling, all carried along by the life, 
 the movement, the strength, of the emo 
 tions which reached their flood-tides in 
 these moments of his inspiration. 
 
 We cannot go through The Cathe 
 dral, and say, "So Lowell thought," 
 " This Lowell was." I suppose it might 
 not be hard to pick out verses of which 
 the thought is directly contradicted by 
 what he said and felt at other times. 
 But the dialectic of poetry often finds 
 its most undoubtable affirmations in such 
 contradictions. Some things, like the 
 walls of Camelot, were never so, and are 
 therefore so forever. The poem itself 
 says that moments of appreciation are 
 never again what they once were ; that 
 they come back to us in recollection, 
 blurred with the mist of afterthought ? ? ; 
 that they are as short as the i wave s poise 
 
82 JAMES EUSSELL LOWELL 
 before it break in pearl." But, really, 
 the moment of which the poem is the 
 immortality was like the wave s poise 
 only because it had been upheaved from 
 the depths of an ocean that receded far 
 and far toward the dim horizon of mem 
 ory. It was a moment in which Lowell 
 knew himself as poet, and almost the last 
 such moment. He was hereafter to be 
 known best as he will be known longest. 
 For it was not until 1870 or even 1871 
 that the chance reader had the possibility 
 of knowing Lowell at his best, so far as 
 any particular form of literature was 
 concerned ; namely, as an essayist. Con- 
 versations on Some of our Old Poets was 
 published in 1844, but it had run out of 
 print ; and, even if it had not, Lowell 
 had got beyond it. A number of essays, 
 Fireside Travels, published in magazines 
 about the same time, came to belated 
 book-form in the sixties. He had writ 
 ten many articles for the Atlantic and 
 North American Review, but the curious 
 
JAMES EUSSELL LOWELL 83 
 custom of printing articles unsigned in 
 those magazines during the greater part 
 of the time in which he had written for 
 them made it more or less doubtful if 
 the readers always knew when they were 
 reading his work. In 1870, however, 
 he gathered up a number of the essays 
 which had appeared in the North Ameri 
 can Review, and published them under 
 the title of Among my Books. In 1871 
 he published another collection of essays, 
 called My Study Windows, and in 1876 a 
 third collection, a second series of 
 Among my Books. 
 
 In these collections we have twenty- 
 five essays which will probably last long 
 er than anything else of LowelPs. The 
 greater number of them were written 
 between the years 1865 and 1875. What 
 prose he had written before remains un 
 read by the great mass of readers. What 
 he wrote subsequently never has had any 
 such acceptance and never will be so 
 widely known. What he wrote in other 
 
84 JAMES BUSSELL LOWELL 
 forms, though sometimes more eagerly 
 appreciated at the moment, will probably 
 not remain, save for a dozen exceptional 
 pieces ; and even these, however express 
 ive of himself, are not the best things of 
 their kind, and will have less and less 
 chance of life as the world goes on. 
 
 The best of Lowell s essays, however, 
 I am inclined to believe, are as good 
 essays, as such, as there are. For criti 
 cism, for scholarship, for philosophy, 
 these magazine articles have been sur 
 passed. But, as essays, they are not 
 easily equalled. This may seem an ab 
 surd statement, or, rather, it may seem 
 as though I were endeavoring to dis 
 tinguish the thought of these essays from 
 their form, and to praise the latter at 
 the expense of the former. I am not 
 trying to do that. It is just because the 
 
 i expression in these essays so exactly fits 
 the thought, because the essays are so 
 admirably expressive of Lowell think- 
 
 \ing, that I think them so good. 
 
JAMES KUSSELL LOWELL 85 
 
 They are of two classes, or, perhaps, 
 
 better of four. First, those on literature, 
 
 the essays on "Dante," the "Library 
 of Old Authors," "Bousseau," "Less- 
 ing," and on the great English poets 
 from Chaucer to Wordsworth. Next 
 are essays on current criticism on 
 "Carlyle," "Emerson," "Swinburne," 
 "Thoreau." Next on what might be 
 called history more or less recent, 
 "Witchcraft," "New England Two 
 Centuries Ago," "A Great Public Char 
 acter, " " Abraham Lincoln, and, lastly, 
 
 I don t know precisely under what 
 head to group them, "My Garden 
 
 j Acquaintance," "A Good Word for 
 Winter," "On a Certain Condescen 
 sion in Foreigners." This arrangement 
 makes them look rather bookish on the 
 
 ; whole, but an essay is apt to be bookish ; 
 and Lowell, even though he did not 
 really look out on the world through 
 books, was very likely to settle his own 
 reflections on life by the fish-skin (or 
 
86 JAMES BUSSELL LOWELL 
 egg, if you prefer) of another man s 
 printed page. 
 
 For the most part the essays were 
 printed just as they had appeared in the 
 North American Review. Some, however, 
 had first come out in the Atlantic / and 
 some were rewritings of older articles. 
 Even the review articles had sometimes 
 been rewritten or condensed from previ 
 ous material. Still, almost all took form 
 in the years we are now writing of ; and 
 they serve to give us an idea of how he 
 passed his time in those years, of how 
 his mind worked. Lowell was himself 
 rather of the opinion that the essay on 
 Dryden was his best essay. I have no 
 idea on what he based this view. It 
 may have been but a fancy, or it may 
 have been that the essay more exactly 
 expressed the ideas he had had in mind 
 when writing than any of the others, 
 a thing which must always be very satis 
 factory to the writer. Were it not for 
 this view of Lowell himself, I should 
 
JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL 87 
 pronounce confidently in favor of the 
 essay on " Emerson, the Lecturer. " In 
 the narrow compass of this short essay 
 we have the essence of Lowell s best 
 prose, and, I had almost said, of Emer 
 son, too 5 but that would be going a little 
 too far. 
 
 But, whether it be one or the other 
 that is the best of all, the quality of 
 the essays in general is indisputable. 
 Lowell has thought on fine things, and 
 expressed himself most naturally with 
 the richness of a full mind and the fancy 
 of a subtle mind ; and the result is that 
 we cannot read him without our mind 
 also taking energy to some degree at 
 least, and that we call being interested. 
 
 I classed the essays in one way a mo 
 ment ago, but now we may think of 
 them in another. This essay on Emerson 
 is not only an essay in current criticism, 
 but it is very distinctly a New England 
 essay; and so are those on "Thoreau," 
 on " Josiah Quincy," on " Witchcraft, " 
 
88 JAMES EUSSELL LOWELL 
 on "New England Two Centuries Ago ; 
 and so, on the whole, are those on " My 
 Garden Acquaintance/ "A Good Word 
 for Winter, 7 and "A Certain Conde 
 scension." The others are the essays of 
 the critic ; but these, we cannot but feel, 
 are rather more the essays of the man. 
 These are not merely essays of Lowell s 
 study. They are essays of all Elmwood, 
 with its birds and its trees 5 of all Cam 
 bridge, with its dear friends and famous 
 thinkers ; of New England, now and 
 centuries back. Lowell, the professor, 
 lectures charmingly on English literature 
 from Chaucer to Wordsworth ; but here, 
 to my mind at least, we have more of 
 the life and spirit of the man. 
 
 And the form of the essays follows so 
 easily and agrees so wholly with the 
 fluent thought, is the thought even, we 
 might almost say. They are so full of 
 figure and allusion, and therefore so rich, 
 so full of kindness and sympathy, and 
 therefore so vital, so full of good sense 
 
JAMES EUSSELL LOWELL 89 
 and good thought, and therefore so 
 sound. The essay on Emerson I like, 
 because it has in very short compass 
 much that is very characteristic of Low 
 ell and of his way of thinking. Take 
 merely the figures that he loved (in 
 poetry or in prose), and see what sort of 
 things were running in his head. He 
 was always comparing his idea to some 
 lovely thing in nature, or he was illus 
 trating it by some allusion to a favorite 
 book, or he had seen some quaint resem 
 blance to some every -day affair. Doubt 
 less, now and then, his reading will take 
 him out of the reach of yours. You may 
 not remember about the nameless eagle 
 of the Ygdrasil, or the profanity of Marl- 
 borough s army; but these are small 
 matters, nor are they common in this 
 particular essay. You can tell what he 
 means when he speaks of u a kind of 
 undertow in that rich barytone of his 
 that sweeps our minds from their foot 
 hold into deeper waters with a drift we 
 
90 JAMES BUSSELL LOWELL 
 cannot and would not resist/ 7 or of 
 "some flash of humor which always 
 played about the horizon of his mind, 
 like heat lightning 77 ; and always you 
 are conscious of that something which 
 with Lowell, as with Dry den, "gave 
 flavor to whatever he wrote, a very 
 rare quality. 77 
 
 And, surely, it is as the New Englander 
 that Lowell is most himself, will be best 
 remembered, rather than as the critic 
 who wrote the essays on English litera 
 ture. Canons of criticism change, and 
 the critic 7 s reputation is apt to become 
 a reputation by courtesy. Not to dis 
 parage Lowell 7 s other essays, it may still 
 be said that they gain half their charm 
 now, not from the keenness or inspira 
 tion of the thought, but from the homely 
 yet golden nature of the thinker. 
 
VII. 
 
 WITH the year 1872 Lowell seems to 
 have felt the need of having a little 
 more fun. He had done a good deal of 
 work. He had been professor for seven 
 teen years ; he had been an editor for 
 fifteen. He had got together his poems 
 and published them, and had gathered 
 two volumes of essays. He felt that he 
 deserved a vacation. "If everything 
 goes well/ he wrote to Mr. Leslie 
 Stephen, "I mean to go abroad in a 
 year from last June, that is, at the 
 end of our next college year ; and, if I 
 do, you will see a youth you never 
 saw before. " This youth was the re 
 generate Lowell : the old man Lowell 
 Mr. Stephen had seen when he visited 
 America during the war. 
 
 So far as England was concerned, it 
 was really a different Lowell, or rather 
 the same Lowell with a mood naturally 
 changed by circumstances. As was most 
 
92 JAMES EUSSELL LOWELL 
 natural for a man so devoted to the 
 literature of England and to the princi 
 ples of democracy which England has 
 championed so long, Lowell had had a 
 most kindly feeling for England herself. 
 The appreciation of The Biglow Papers 
 in England was very grateful to him. 
 It made him feel that he was doing 
 something worthy of being considered 
 after the works of the great authors he 
 admired so much. Only a year before 
 the war he wrote to Thomas Hughes, 
 who was to edit an English reprint of 
 The Biglow Papers, "It has been a par 
 ticular satisfaction to me to hear, now 
 and then, some friendly voice from the 
 old mother island say, Well done ! ? of 
 The Biglow Papers." 
 
 But, when the Civil War broke out, 
 Lowell was grievously disappointed in 
 the position of England, or at least of 
 her representative men and newspapers. 
 "Cross as terriers at your kind of neu 
 trality/ he wrote to Hughes in one of 
 
JAMES EUSSELL LOWELL 93 
 the very few letters lie sent to England 
 at this time; but "cross," as any one 
 will remember from the second Biglow 
 Papers, was rather a mild word to de 
 scribe his state of mind. At the end 
 of the war he wrote, "I share with a 
 great body of my countrymen in a bit 
 terness (half resentment and half regret) 
 which I cannot yet get over." Still, 
 when Longfellow went to England not 
 long afterward, Lowell, with the others 
 of the Club, " folio wed his triumphal 
 progress with pride and sympathy," so 
 that he even rather wished himself on 
 the other side once more. And, since it 
 was not the acts of England so much as 
 the feeling, the spirit of the nation, it 
 was not unnatural that such events as 
 the Treaty of Washington, providing 
 for the "Alabama" arbitration, should 
 have done much to convince him that 
 things were not quite as they had been. 
 He wanted to see that England felt that 
 she had mistaken her true interest in 
 
94 JAMES BUSSELL LOWELL 
 the sympathy she had shown for the 
 South. And, finally, he came to think 
 even that it had not been so much the 
 feeling of England as the tone in which 
 it had been expressed. 
 
 He did go abroad, and, as if to show 
 that " Jonathan to John 7 had left no 
 lasting trace, the University of Oxford 
 conferred on him the degree of D.C.L., 
 and the next year Cambridge gave him 
 the LL.D. As a university man himself 
 and as a -man of public reputation, he 
 was naturally much pleased at these dis 
 tinctions; and England was safe in his 
 good graces again, as -he was in hers. 
 The winter of 1872-73, however, he 
 spent in Paris, and the next winter in 
 Italy, though not without visits to Lon 
 don. In the summer of 1874 he came 
 back to America and was heartily glad 
 to find himself at home again. He was 
 never happy, he sometimes thought, 
 away from Elmwood ; and, certainly, he 
 was surrounded by a group of friends 
 
JAMES KUSSELL LOWELL 95 
 there who made life delightful to him. 
 We are apt to imagine that distinguished 
 men must always have other distin 
 guished men for their friends. It is not 
 always so. Distinguished men get to a 
 curiously just estimate of the value of 
 fame, in part, perhaps, by seeing among 
 their friends men of quite as much char 
 acter or even ability as the most famous 
 of all, who remain entirely out of the 
 eye of the public. Lowell was the inti 
 mate friend of Longfellow, Emerson, and 
 Holmes, and saw them often. But quite 
 as near his heart were others ; and, if 
 when abroad he felt homesick, as he 
 sometimes did, we may be quite sure 
 that it was not merely the society of 
 Longfellow, Emerson, and Holmes that 
 he missed. Other old friends were espe 
 cially dear to him (though names and 
 gifts need not be here recorded) ; and 
 one of the great charms of Cambridge 
 was that there he continued the friend 
 ships that had long come of age, and 
 
96 JAMES EUSSELL LOWELL 
 were indeed now stretching on toward 
 the fortieth and fiftieth year. It should 
 have been said some time before, but 
 that the continuity of other lines would 
 have been broken thereby, that in 1856 
 Lowell married Miss Frances Dunlap, a 
 lady who had for some years had the 
 care of his daughter Mabel. Thus Elm- 
 wood had again become a home, in the 
 fullest sense of the word. Here, too, I 
 ought to commemorate a constant fac 
 tor in Lo welPs life; namely, the famous 
 whist club which gathered once a week 
 for fifty years, with Mr. John Bartlett 
 and Mr. John Holmes as the most regu 
 lar members. 
 
 While abroad, he had rejoiced his 
 heart with the thought of giving up his 
 professorship. He had always liked to 
 think of it as something of a cross : we 
 have seen that he made it the scapegoat 
 for his unpoetical moments. It would 
 be impossible to say, hardly worth while 
 to try to guess, what might have been his 
 
JAMES KUSSELL LOWELL 97 
 fortune, had he declined the offer made 
 him almost twenty years before. Would 
 he have been more possessed by poetry ? 
 We might as well speculate as to what 
 would have resulted, had he tried to 
 write a novel, as Mr. Fields once asked 
 him. He himself always thought, as 
 has been said, that his professorship had 
 stood in the way of his success in poetry. 
 Some years after this he wrote to another 
 author, who had been offered a professor 
 ship, "If you are able now, without 
 overworking mind and body, to keep 
 the wolf from the door and to lay by 
 something for a rainy day, ... I should 
 refuse the offer," said he, and went on, 
 "If you are a systematic worker, inde 
 pendent of moods, and sure of your 
 genius whenever you want it, there might 
 be no risk in accepting." When we 
 think that Lowell was not a very sys 
 tematic worker, not independent of 
 moods, not sure of his genius whenever 
 he wanted it, and that he was quite 
 
98 JAMES BUSSELL LOWELL 
 aware of his own character in this direc 
 tion, we can see what he really thought 
 of the matter. We have seen that Low- 
 elFs scholarship was no great aid to his 
 poetry. Still there is room for thinking 
 that the practical man-to-man work of a 
 professor is a good thing for those who 
 wish to understand life. 
 
 However he felt, he did not give up 
 his professorship. The zero weather of 
 the winter found him walking to and 
 from the college, where he lectured on 
 Old French and Dante. Nor was he 
 without poetic moments, for here belong 
 the three Centennial Odes. 
 
 In the autumn of 1876 he had a new 
 experience : he was chosen one of the 
 electors of the President of the United 
 States. The office is an honorary one, 
 for an elector is supposed to vote as his 
 constituents desire ; but the point is one 
 of interest in the life of Lowell. He had, 
 of course, always done his best in public 
 matters. But he began as a writer who 
 
JAMES EUSSELL LOWELL 99 
 
 does his work with his pen; and as a 
 writer he had continued, as has been seen. 
 He had never been without what our 
 American phrase calls "activity" in 
 politics. Now, however, came an occa 
 sion ; namely, a Presidential election. 
 The eight years of General Grant s hold 
 ing office had not been marked by an 
 exceptionally lofty tone in politics ; and 
 Lowell, who was very proud of his 
 country in the best way, had even under 
 Grant s first administration writhed a 
 good deal under much that had gone on, 
 although he believed in Grant himself. 
 But it would seem that his absence from 
 the country had given him a standpoint 
 whence he could see more clearly than 
 he had seen at home. Certainly, he had 
 not been at home very long before he 
 began with his old weapon. Was the 
 time for it gone by? At any rate, he 
 did not content himself with satire ; but 
 in the very beginning of the Presidential 
 campaign or, rather, of the campaign 
 
100 JAMES BUSSELL LOWELL 
 for the delegates to the Eepublican Con 
 vention he " appeared in a new ca 
 pacity, as chairman of a political meet 
 ing. " He did not feel particularly 
 hopeful; but he said, "If there beany 
 hope, it is in getting independent thinkers 
 to be independent voters. 7 
 
 He wrote to Mr. Leslie Stephen that he 
 feared he had " made an ass of himself. " 
 Instead of this he had practically made 
 himself a delegate to Cincinnati, where 
 he was extremely interested in seeing 
 America as he had never seen it before. 
 He did not succeed in nominating the 
 candidate whom he especially favored, 
 but he did help in defeating the candi 
 date whose nomination he felt would 
 have been a national calamity. E. B. 
 Hayes was nominated, and Lowell was 
 named one of the Massachusetts electors. 
 It seems, however, that, although actu 
 ally on the State ticket, he had had him 
 self some doubt as to whether he would 
 vote for Hayes or Tilden. 
 
JAMES BUSSELL LOWELL 101 
 The election of 1876 was a contested 
 election, and the result in the college of 
 electors was finally decided by one vote. 
 Mr. George William Curtis, in the eu 
 logy on Lowell pronounced at Brooklyn, 
 says that, " in the multitude of electors, 
 Lowell alone was mentioned as one who 
 might exercise the right 77 of voting ac 
 cording to his judgment rather than 
 according to instructions. Lowell would 
 not have done so, for he believed that 
 acceptance to the nomination to the 
 electorship was a tacit promise to vote 
 the party ticket. But the incident was 
 regarded as proof of Lowell s indepen 
 dence in politics. 
 
 Hayes was elected ; and, not long after 
 he had become President, Lowell was 
 asked to represent the United States at 
 one of the courts of Europe. Vienna 
 and Berlin were at first mentioned 5 but 
 Lowell seems to have had no desire to go 
 to Germany again, and he declined each. 
 He was asked then if he would not go to 
 
102 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL 
 Spain, having in some way let it be 
 known that he was not so averse to 
 Madrid. It was an honorable position, 
 and probably he had some thought that 
 he would like the chance of knowing a 
 little better the language of his favorite 
 Calderon. So, like Washington Irving 
 before him, he became minister to Spain; 
 and, with many regrets at leaving Elm- 
 wood and the birds, he proceeded in a 
 leisurely manner to Madrid, which he 
 reached the middle of August, 1877. 
 Our diplomatic and consular service is 
 a peculiar thing. It can hardly be said 
 to be governed by any fixed principle ; 
 but, among the various principles that 
 more or less affect it, one is that it is 
 well to appoint men of letters now and 
 then. When you consider that men of 
 letters are not generally thought of as 
 eminently practical persons, it seems 
 curious that they should be held espe 
 cially qualified to manage the affairs of 
 their country in foreign lands. Lowell 
 
JAMES BUSSELL LOWELL 103 
 
 was certainly one of the most practical 
 men of letters we have had, for his great 
 distinction had been that he had known 
 how to use letters as a force in public 
 affairs. He was a poet; but he had 
 never secluded himself and fed on bee- 
 food, at least, never for a long time. 
 
 He remained in Spain only two years 
 and a half, and gradually grew to enjoy 
 himself very much, although he had 
 frequent desires to go home. He de 
 voted himself to the study of Spanish, 
 a spirited proceeding in a man of nearly 
 sixty, working with a professor two 
 hours a day, translating French into 
 Spanish, and, in fact, working almost as 
 hard as he had worked in Dresden. But 
 his stay was not absolutely to his liking. 
 In 1880 he was fortunately transferred to 
 England. 
 
 It was fortunate that Lowell was trans 
 ferred to England, not only because he 
 had in England a remarkably delight 
 ful time, but chiefly because he was 
 
104 JAMES EUSSELL LOWELL 
 such an excellent representative of his 
 country there. It was not so much 
 what he did as what he was that made 
 him excellent ; for his labors were not 
 very arduous, except in the cases of a 
 number of Americans, whose very close 
 relations to Ireland at a time of some 
 delicacy led to complications. It was 
 not, however, what Lowell did, but 
 what he was, that made him so good a 
 representative of his country. It cannot 
 with truth be said that Lowell was a 
 representative American because there 
 were so many Americans just like him. 
 No, he was not a realistic representative 
 of America : he was rather an idealiza 
 tion of America. His qualities were, on 
 the whole, American qualities, his hu 
 mor, his common sense, his democratic 
 breadth, his love of nature, his facility 
 of speech. And, without wishing to 
 appropriate to ourselves all the excellent 
 and delightful qualities which made 
 Lowell such a favorite with the best 
 
JAMES EUSSELL LOWELL 105 
 people in England, we may at least be 
 glad that we had such a man to be even 
 technically our representative. 
 
 But Lowell was our representative in 
 other than official ways. He was the 
 one to speak on the dedication of a bust 
 in Westminster Abbey to Longfellow. 
 He spoke at the great memorial meeting 
 held at Exeter Hall on the death of 
 President Garfield. He spoke to the 
 Midland Institute on Democracy. For 
 was he merely the proper person to 
 speak on such occasions. He seemed 
 to be as gifted as an occasional orator as 
 he was as a poet or essayist. He spoke 
 also many other times when England was 
 glad to hear what the New England 
 critic had to say on Gray, Coleridge, 
 Pepys. And on a thousand private 
 i occasions, also, Lowell did for one or 
 another group of people what he was 
 doing for the people of England as a 
 whole. 
 
 When Cleveland was elected Presi- 
 
106 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL 
 
 dent, it became probable that Lowell, 
 according to the common custom, would 
 be recalled on account of difference in 
 politics. He had been appointed by a 
 Republican President ; but, as far as 
 politics were concerned, it is very prob 
 able that, had he been in America dur 
 ing the Presidential campaign, he would 
 have voted the Democratic ticket. Still, 
 by unhappy fortune, it fell out that he 
 was very glad to be relieved from duty. 
 In the winter of 1884 his wife died ; and 
 he came back to America, glad to be 
 away from England, glad to get home, 
 but without any special care whether he 
 were minister or not. 
 
 These years now to come the last six 
 years of Lowell s life we are apt to 
 look upon as being, on the whole, melan 
 choly and pathetic. There is some rea 
 son for the feeling ; for the years began 
 with the lost feeling that is left by the 
 death of one we have loved and de 
 pended on, and they ended with the 
 
JAMES EUSSELL LOWELL 107 
 pain and trouble of recurrent illness. It 
 is to be said, also, that Lowell did 
 not return to the old place which he 
 loved so dearly, nor to the duties which 
 had made up his life, even when he had 
 girded at them. Then the feeling of 
 growing old is always in itself melan 
 choly, and the surviving one s old friends 
 and one s old powers is painful. 
 
 But except for these necessities, as we 
 may well enough call them, the last years 
 of Lowell s life were singularly happy. 
 He would not go back to Elmwood ; but 
 the Deerfoot Farm, Southboro, where 
 he went to live with his daughter, Mrs. 
 Burnett, though not exactly a substi 
 tute in kind, was a place where he 
 could enjoy himself outdoors and in 
 much the same ways that had always 
 been his favorites. He came back also 
 to his old friends to those oldest friends 
 whom he had loved for so many years, 
 and to those a bit younger who were 
 gradually moving up into the places 
 
108 JAMES EUSSELL LOWELL 
 which were falling vacant. To the old 
 friends of his study he also came back 
 (if we can say that he ever really left 
 them). To these years belong several 
 studies in literature, on Donne, an old 
 favorite, on Izaak Walton, on Landor. 
 He settled down for occupations and 
 amusements, much as was natural, con 
 sidering the necessary changes in circum 
 stance. Nor was there a trace of weak 
 ening of his powers. It is true that 
 never again did he rise quite to the 
 height which, some dozen times before, 
 he had for moments touched. But that 
 one hardly expects. He could still write 
 poetry, and could still write prose. He 
 did not entirely give up college work, 
 but for the first years had his class at 
 Harvard on Dante ; and he lectured 
 once more before the Lowell Institute, 
 this time upon his old-time favorites, 
 the Elizabethan Dramatists. He was 
 often called on for occasions : at the 
 Harvard Two Hundred and Fiftieth An- 
 
JAMES BUSSELL LOWELL 109 
 niversary, at the Centenary of the Batifi - 
 cation of the Constitution. He was, per 
 haps, less in the eye of the public than 
 he had been before his absence in Spain 
 and England ; but he was still an in 
 fluence in America, both in literature 
 and in politics. 
 
 His summers he usually spent in Eng 
 land. Going over in April or May, he 
 would stay in London for the season, and 
 then go to Whitby in the north, a favor 
 ite place with him. In London he had 
 many friends of whom he was very fond ; 
 but he had also that curious love of the 
 great city itself, the fascination for the 
 busy world of men and (now) of women, 
 which you are very apt to find in intel 
 lectual men, especially in those whose 
 occupation is a little out of the practical 
 ordinary run of things. He loved the 
 city when he was in London, and he had 
 the country and the sea when he was at 
 Whitby. 
 
 In 1889 he returned to Elmwood, and 
 
110 JAMES BUSSELL LOWELL 
 not alone ; for with him were his daugh 
 ter and his grandchildren. And here 
 he lived until his death, two years after 
 ward. The great pleasures of the old 
 are unselfish. When a man passes 
 seventy, if not before, he is apt to take 
 his greatest pleasure in the happiness of 
 those about him. We need not think 
 much of Lowell himself during these last 
 years, for he was not over-thoughtful 
 of himself. Beading old books and 
 looking pleasantly on young people, he 
 passed the time easily until the end 
 (Aug. 12, 1891), which, if not happily 
 sudden, was at least preceded by no 
 weakness of the mind or of the spirit. 
 
UNIVERSITY 
 OF 
 
 VIII. 
 
 BEFORE Lowell s death he had been 
 felt generally and rightly to be the rep- \ 
 resentative American man of letters of 
 his day. As such he is still regarded, 
 and in all probability time will never 
 take from him the distinction of having 
 been the successor in this respect of 
 "Washington Irving. Other reputations 
 may change, but this one is likely to 
 endure ; for it is rather historical than 
 critical. It is more a matter of fact than 
 a question of taste. 
 
 If we ask what is to be understood 
 by the phrase "the representative man 
 of letters/ we may say at once that it 
 does not mean the greatest genius, in the 
 ordinary acceptance of the word. John 
 son would probably be taken as the rep 
 resentative man of letters of his time, 
 although he was not such a poet as Gold 
 smith nor even a man of such pre-em 
 inent genius in so many directions. 
 
112 JAMES EUSSELL LOWELL 
 Goldsmith wrote not only the best 
 poems, but the best comedies, the best 
 novel, the best essays of his day. John 
 son wrote nothing that can be, or rather 
 that is, compared with them. Bnt John 
 son, not Goldsmith, is the representative 
 man of letters. In like manner Dryden 
 is the representative man of letters of an 
 earlier day, although his comedies are 
 not so good as those of Congreve nor his 
 tragedies as those of Otway. He is not 
 a greater master of prose than Temple, 
 nor a man of such genius or influence as 
 Bunyan. Still, he was held in his own 
 day, and he still is, the chief figure in 
 the world of letters of his time. 
 
 So with Lowell. As a poet, he was 
 surpassed by Longfellow and Poe, to 
 consider the feeling of his own time and 
 of ours. As a scholar, he was not the 
 superior of Whitney or of Marsh. As 
 a writer of prose, he is neither better nor 
 more admired than Hawthorne or Park- 
 man. Nor as an acknowledged influ- 
 
JAMES BUSSELL LOWELL 113 
 ence among thinking men was he the 
 superior of Emerson in one direction 
 or Beecher in the other. Neither can 
 we say that he reached his eminence 
 through no especial power in some par 
 ticular direction, but through energy in 
 all. This is never a great advantage in 
 the world of letters, so far as fame is con 
 cerned : it is a disadvantage. "Jack- 
 of- all-trades 7 we say, when a man 
 essays all departments of literature and 
 attains the first place in none. 
 
 The pre-eminence of Lowell was quite 
 justly gained : he was pre-eminent in a 
 quality which has not yet been named, 
 a quality which will account in a meas 
 ure for eminence in so many lines of 
 literature, even without pre-eminence in 
 any of them. It was the quality that 
 made him a man of letters in a sense 
 almost literal, a man who understood 
 literature, who, on feeling himself called 
 upon to speak, understood thoroughly 
 the instrument he had to use, even 
 
114 JAMES EUSSELL LOWELL 
 though unable to touch its greatest 
 possibilities in any particular use. 
 
 This is not to say that Lowell was a 
 critic, except in a very large sense of the 
 word. He was a critic, it is true; but 
 it was not because he was a critic, as we 
 commonly think of critics, that he is 
 a more representative man than Emer 
 son or Longfellow or Hawthorne. It 
 was because he understood better the 
 place and the possibilities of literature 
 in the life around him. If we call that 
 being a critic (and, in a large sense, we 
 may well do so), Lowell was mainly a 
 critic. That he could not write poetry 
 like Longfellow s, nor novels like those 
 of Hawthorne, nor essays like Emerson s, 
 does not take away this honor from him. 
 / Longfellow wrote poems, not because 
 he understood that certain things might 
 be done by means of poetry, but because 
 he liked to do so. Hawthorne wrote 
 novels, not to exploit any purpose or 
 problem, but because he liked to write 
 
JAMES BUSSELL LOWELL 115 
 novels. Longfellow was popular, Haw 
 thorne at first unpopular ; but the one 
 fact does not show the powers and the 
 other does not show the limitations of 
 literature as a force in life. Nor can we 
 say that Emerson thoroughly understood 
 the means of which he availed himself. 
 If he had, he would have been a power 
 long before he was. 
 
 Lowell understood that literature was 
 not merely the expression of the artist 
 or the means of communication of the 
 thinker any more than the privilege of a 
 mandarin caste or the respectable ne 
 cessity of a growing nation. He felt that 
 it was a force in the world and an im 
 mense one, and he did his best to use it. 
 Not always purposely and consciously; 
 his own especial desire was to sit in his 
 study or outdoors about the house, and 
 write poetry of lofty aspiration and 
 imaginative insight and whimsical fancy. 
 But, fortunately, he was not able to con 
 fine himself to this occupation : he could 
 
116 JAMES BUSSELL LOWELL 
 not resist the feeling that he had some 
 thing more to do in the world. This 
 something he could accomplish by no 
 other means than the spoken and written 
 word. Other men work with their 
 hands, or plan work for inferiors, or 
 fight, or sail ships, or make shoes, or 
 conceive foreign policies for the nation. 
 There are unnumbered ways whereby 
 people bring things to pass. With 
 Lowell, literature, too, became an active 
 force, not only accomplishing things 
 itself, but taking also its place in the 
 things accomplished by the nation. So 
 Lowell kept in the current of events, and 
 did what he could. He was willing to 
 use any good means that circumstances 
 put into his hand. At first he wrote 
 poems, then newspaper articles, then 
 poems again where he made his first 
 great hit, then lectures where he made 
 his second hit. Then he did editorial 
 work, and took to political leaders. 
 Then he turned to poetry again, and 
 
JAMES EUSSELL LOWELL 117 
 then to fresh forms. And by this time 
 he had been at work for a generation ; 
 and people knew that here was a man 
 who was one of the leaders of America, 
 one who understood America, and who 
 had a keen eye ont ahead for her future, 
 and who used all the talents that had 
 been intrusted to him for her use and 
 special behoof. He thus became, if not 
 ruler over ten cities, at least one of the 
 de facto joint- rulers over a greater num 
 ber of commonwealths. 
 
 In other words, Lowell was one of the 
 men who helped to shape the destiny of 
 America ; and his means was literature. 
 And this people recognized, on the 
 whole ; and, although he could not write 
 poems like Longfellow, and although he 
 had no philosophy like that of Emerson, 
 they regarded him yet as the foremost 
 figure in literature because he had been 
 a worker to such real advantage. 
 
 It does not follow from this that every 
 representative man of letters is a man 
 
118 JAMES EUSSELL LOWELL 
 who uses letters as a practical force. 
 Irving was not, and yet he was quite as 
 representative a man of letters of his 
 own time as Lowell was of his. Irving 
 is the representative of the first genera 
 tion of American literature, say from 
 1810-1840 ; Lowell, of the second, say 
 1840- -1870. The two periods were very 
 different. The one called for culture, 
 the other for action. Irving was a man 
 who saw everything as literature, and 
 this was what was wanted in a nation 
 that was doing little more than settling 
 down and in a manner forming itself. 
 Lowell, on the other hand, did not see 
 everything as literature. He saw litera 
 ture itself as an impulse to action ; and, 
 as action was called for by the time, he 
 made literature his means rather than 
 his end. 
 
 In his generation, literature was dis 
 tinctively a force for action. Not that 
 it was nothing else : it was, as it has 
 often been, on the whole didactic, as in 
 
JAMES BUSSELL LOWELL 119 
 " Brahma/ 7 for instance; it probed the 
 depths of life, as in The Scarlet Letter ; 
 it was frankly and merely beautiful, as 
 in " Annabel Lee" or "Ulalume 77 ; it 
 was a charming relaxation after the 
 burden and heat of the day, as in Hia 
 watha. Even with Lowell himself, it 
 was all these things to a greater or less 
 degree in "Sir Launfal," " The Cathe 
 dral/ 7 "A Legend of Brittany, 77 "The 
 Courtin 7 . 77 But in those years litera 
 ture was also and especially a national 
 force, so that the historian, who says 
 nothing of "mere literature 77 as such, 
 will probably take account of The Blglow 
 Papers, Uncle Tom s Cabin, "Ichabod," 
 and (I like to think) The Man without a 
 Country. 
 
 In our own time literature is hardly 
 such a force. What happens under our 
 eyes is hard to see clearly. But it seems, 
 on the whole, as if we had neither 
 Irving 7 s object especially in view, nor 
 Lowell 7 s. We have got perfectly used 
 
120 JAMES BUSSELL LOWELL 
 to looking at everything as literature, so 
 that any five years graduate can turn 
 out as good literature as you need right 
 from the topics of the day. Nor is it so 
 particularly necessary to use literature 
 as a means of bringing things to pass. 
 The people who wish to do anything 
 nowadays are using means which, for 
 the time being, are infinitely more 
 powerful. Literature is now serving a 
 wholly different purpose, so far as it is 
 serious : it is serving as an interpreter of 
 the secret of life, a matter in which we 
 have become much interested. This was 
 a matter in which the preceding genera 
 tion was not as much concerned as we 
 are, and hence neither the work of 
 Irving nor of Lowell intrinsically can 
 hold the same place for us that it held 
 in their own day. They were particu 
 larly and pre-eminently men of letters of 
 their own time. 
 
 But we need not feel that because 
 Lowell is a figure of a past generation 
 
JAMES BUSSELL LOWELL 121 
 
 that he has nothing to say to us. It is 
 true that directly he has not very much. 
 The man who is more or less influenced 
 by the present currents of thought and 
 feeling has not very much real and direct 
 interest in Lowell s work as literature. 
 A smile or two over The Biglow Papers, 
 a thrill over the " Commemoration Ode," 
 half a dozen familiar quotations, a num 
 ber of good bits of criticism tucked up in 
 capital figures, these are the residuum of 
 a reading of Lowell on the average reader 
 who knows and cares for the life and lit 
 erature of the present. But and the 
 u but ? ? is a large one any one who will 
 appreciate Lowell as he himself used to 
 appreciate his predecessors, will gain 
 from LowelFs collected work, not the 
 supreme aesthetic pleasure that we get 
 only from the art of our own time, the 
 few great geniuses of all time, and the 
 few curious exceptions that each one of 
 us insists on making in the deadening 
 judgment of the years, not that, but a 
 
122 JAMES BUSSELL LOWELL 
 
 consciousness of the vigor and power of 
 the thinking and feeling man as a work 
 ing element in society. This is a thing 
 that we cannot easily get from any au 
 thor of our own race and generation, be 
 cause we have no such man to-day as 
 Lowell. It is something that we cannot 
 get so easily from the work of men of 
 any other nation, for such authors deal 
 always with a civilization that is not our 
 own. Lowell was essentially an Ameri 
 can. 
 
 An understanding of the power of let 
 ters as a factor in the world s work, that 
 is what we get from Lowell. It is some 
 thing that we cannot get from Emerson 
 or Longfellow or Hawthorne. To the 
 same degree we cannot get it from others 
 who worked along with Lowell, from 
 Mrs. Stowe or Whittier, because no 
 other writer of his time used the power 
 of literature so broadly and so. finely as 
 did he. He was the personification of 
 letters in life. 
 
JAMES BUSSELL LOWELL 123 
 And this feeling is something that we 
 can never do without. Literature is 
 Protean, now one thing and now an 
 other. So soon as we begin to think of 
 it as something definite, something fixed, 
 it begins to harden : instead of letters in 
 any broad sense, we have hieratic writ 
 ing. Lowell himself saw literature dif 
 ferently at different times. But the 
 main tendency of his own activity made 
 literature a force in the world. When 
 we forget that literature is a force in the 
 world, we close our eyes to the facts. 
 Lowell may well stand even in times 
 whose tendencies are different from the 
 tendencies of his own time : he will al 
 ways awaken, stimulate, and vivify. 
 
BIBLIOGEAPHY. 
 
 The first books to read, if you wish 
 to know something of Lowell, are his 
 own writings. The "Standard Library 
 Edition" is in eleven volumes, ten re 
 vised by himself, the other by Pro 
 fessor Norton. This edition contains 
 all of Lowell s work that he wished to 
 preserve. It omits a number of his 
 early poems, his articles for the Boston 
 Miscellany, u Conversations on Some of 
 the Old Poets," the Lowell Lectures 
 of 1855, and a greater number of his 
 periodical contributions. 
 
 There is so far no full life of Lowell. 
 There are, however, several books that 
 go far toward enabling us to form our 
 own opinions. The following list of 
 books will amply serve even the most 
 careful reader : 
 
 I. JAMES EUSSELL LOWELL: A BIO 
 GRAPHICAL STUDY. By F. H. Under 
 wood. (Boston, 1882 : J. E. Osgood & 
 
BIBLIOGEAPHY 125 
 
 Co.) Worth reading, although written 
 during LowelFs lifetime, and conse 
 quently incomplete as a life-study. 
 
 II. POETS OF AMERICA. (Boston, 1885 : 
 Houghton, Mifflin & Co. ) The essay on 
 Lowell is by Edmund Clarence Stedman, 
 and is a very excellent critical study. 
 
 III. LATEST LITERARY AND POLITICAL 
 ADDRESSES OF JAMES EUSSELL LOWELL. 
 Edited by Professor Charles Eliot Nor 
 ton. (Boston, 1892 : Houghton, Mifflin 
 &Co.) 
 
 IV. THE OLD ENGLISH DRAMATISTS. 
 By James Eussell Lowell. Edited 
 by Professor Norton. (Boston, 1892: 
 Houghton, Mifflin & Co. ) 
 
 V. THE POET AND THE MAN : EECOL- 
 
 LECTIONS AND APPRECIATIONS OF JAMES 
 
 EUSSELL LOWELL. By F. H. Under 
 wood. (Boston, 1893: Lee & Shep- 
 ard.) Mr. Underwood was very inti 
 mate with Lowell for many years, espe- 
 
126 BIBLIOGEAPHY 
 
 cially during those following the found 
 ing of the Atlantic Monthly, and this ap 
 preciation is on that account of great 
 value. The book is, of course, bio- 
 graphically more complete than number 
 one on this list, by the same author, 
 having been written at a much later 
 date, and after the death of Lowell. 
 
 VI. JAMES EUSSELL LOWELL : AN AD 
 DRESS. By George William Curtis. 
 (New York, 1893 : Harper & Brothers.) 
 Curtis was also an intimate friend of 
 Lowell. This address, though short, is 
 of value, not only from the writer s op 
 portunity to know, but from his clear 
 judgment. 
 
 VII. THE LETTERS OF JAMES EUSSELL 
 LOWELL. Edited by Charles Eliot Nor 
 ton. Two volumes. (New York, 1894 : 
 Harper & Brothers.) After LowelPs 
 published Works, this is the book most 
 necessary to a knowledge of him. It 
 does not give so good an idea of his out- 
 
BIBLIOGEAPHY 127 
 
 ward life as it does of his inner life of 
 thought and feeling. Professor Norton, 
 one of Lowell s most intimate friends 
 and his literary associate and executor, 
 has added enough facts to enable one to 
 read it with understanding. 
 
 VIII. AN INTRODUCTION TO THE STUDY 
 OF AMERICAN LITERATURE. By Bran- 
 der Matthews. (New York, 1896: 
 American Book Company. ) Contains a 
 clear and valuable estimate of Lowell. 
 
 IX. Volume XVI. of the LIBRARY OF 
 THE WORLD S BEST LITERATURE. Ed 
 ited by Charles Dudley Warner. (New 
 York, 1897 : Magazine Publishing Com 
 pany.) Contains also a good criticism 
 of Lowell. 
 
 X. AMERICAN LITERATURE. By C. F. 
 Kichardson. (New York, 1898 : G. P. 
 Putnam s Sons.) This contains a short 
 account of Lowell and is a good specimen 
 of work of its class. 
 
128 BIBLIOGRAPHY 
 
 XI. AMERICAN BOOKMEN. By M. A. 
 De Wolfe Howe. (New York, 1898: 
 Dodd, Mead & Co. ) Gives also a clear, 
 brief critical estimate of the poet, much 
 like number six, but with more illustra 
 tion by portrait and fac-simile. 
 
 XII. JAMES BUSSELL LOWELL AND HIS 
 FRIENDS. By Edward Everett Hale. 
 (Boston, 1899: Houghton, Mifflin & 
 Co.) This is not exactly a life. It is 
 more a series of reminiscences, of me 
 moirs of the time. Dr. Hale was in the 
 class after Lowell at Harvard, but be 
 came a close friend of his. His own life 
 in so many places crossed or paralleled 
 that of Lowell, and his connections reach 
 so widely into the field of Lowell s ac 
 tivity, that he has been able to collect 
 an immense amount of most interesting 
 illustration of our subject, besides sup 
 plying the standpoint of one at once a 
 contemporary of Lowell and of ourselves. 
 
 TB" 
 " or THE 
 
 UNIVERSITY 
 
THE BEACON BIOGRAPHIES. 
 
 M. A. DEWOLFE HOWE, Editor. 
 
 The aim of this series is to furnish brief, readable, and 
 authentic accounts of the lives of those Americans whose 
 personalities have impressed themselves most deeply on the 
 character and history of their country. On account of the 
 length of the more formal lives, often running into large 
 volumes, the average busy man and woman have not the 
 time or hardly the inclination to acquaint themselves with 
 American biography. In the present series everything that 
 such a reader would ordinarily care to know is given by 
 writers of special competence, who possess in full measure 
 the best contemporary point of view. Each volume is 
 equipped with a frontispiece portrait, a calendar of important 
 dates, and a brief bibliography for further reading. Finally, 
 the volumes are printed in a form convenient for reading 
 and for carrying handily in the pocket. 
 
 The following volumes are the first issued : 
 PHILLIPS BROOKS, by the EDITOR. 
 DAVID G. FARRAGUT, by JAMES BARNES. 
 ROBERT E. LEE, by W. P. TRENT. 
 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL, by EDWARD EVERETT 
 
 HALE, JR. 
 DANIEL WEBSTER, by NORMAN HAPGOOD. 
 
 The following are among those in preparation : 
 JOHN JAMES AUDUBON, by JOHN BURROUGHS. 
 EDWIN BOOTH, by CHARLES TOWNSEND COPELAND. 
 AARON BURR, by HENRY CHILDS MERWIN. 
 JAMES FENIMORE COOPER, by W. B. SHUBRICC 
 
 CLYMER. 
 BENJAMIN FRANKLIN, by LINDSAY SWIFT. 
 
 SMALL, MAYNARD & COMPANY, Publishers, 
 6 BEACON STREET, BOSTON. 
 
14 DAY USE 
 
 TURN TO DESK FROM WHICHBORROWED 
 
 LOAN DEPT. 
 
 his book is due on the last date stamped below, or 
 
 on the date to which renewed. 
 Renewed books are subject to immediate recall. 
 
 
 
 eOct 59WW 
 
 nr.T 10